Anna Li’s million-dollar idea helps patients help themselves
Anna Li is hunkered down in Pitt’s Benedum Hall makerspace, noodling with a 3D printer and a soldering iron. She’s on a self-imposed mission.
During one of her recent shifts in the emergency department, the MD/PhD student got an idea for an electronic stethoscope that patients can use at home. She thinks it could empower them to take charge of their health by measuring their own heart and lung function, potentially cutting down on unnecessary trips to the hospital.
After many hours, a lot of trial and error and a few burnt fingers, Li produced a prototype that she hoped to share on GitHub, a web-based platform where developers create and collaborate. But first, she proudly showed it off to her mentor, who immediately recognized the stethoscope’s potential and suggested Li do the hard work of further developing it herself.
Li hesitated.
As she tells it: “Can’t I just 3D print these for a summer and give them out for free?”
“No,” her mentor replied. “There are regulations.”
“Bro, I’m also trying to graduate,” countered Li.
“Well, do you want to make an impact or not?”
“Ugh, why are you like this?”
A pause.
“OK, I’ll do it,” Li relented.
Thus begins the story of Korion Health, the startup Li co-founded in 2022 with Akshaya Anand, a machine-learning graduate student from the University of Maryland who created the stethoscope’s user interface. Early on, the pair won fourth place in Pitt’s Randall Family Big Idea Competition and later received $25,000 from the Big Idea Center’s Advantage Fund, which invests in Pitt students and provides resources to help them take their idea from concept to reality.
In the past year, they also picked up an omnibus patent and won the prestigious international Hult Prize, which comes with a $1 million award to continue developing their company. They’re currently seeking Food and Drug Administration approval.
All that success has come with a lot of attention for Li, who serves as both the CEO and the public face of Korion Health. Media outlets from across the country have become enamored with her ingenuity, sense of humor and relentless passion.
But all that fanfare overshadows something important about Li, and it’s the thing she values most — her humanity.
“The central thesis of my life has been that I really, really care about people,” Li says. “I think the real wealth in life comes from being able to see those you love happy and healthy and to be in a community where people are empowered to live their best lives and take care of each other.”
It’s a philosophy she adopted as a teenager in North Carolina. Back then, Li admits, she took herself a bit too seriously. Her parents are Chinese immigrants who arrived in the United States with just $20 and a fierce work ethic, a trait that trickled down to their youngest child.
“My parents believed that education was everything,” Li says. “To them, it was either get an A or you’re homeless. There was no in between.”
Her own perspective changed in high school when she met a friend through marching band who had a rare type of cystic fibrosis (CF) and wasn’t expected to live past college.
“She’s such a bright spirit,” Li says of the girl who would become her best friend. “I was pretty socially awkward and probably a bit cringey back then, but she was the first person to fully accept me for who I am. She’s taught me so much about how to live in the moment and have that balance between enjoying your life and protecting your future.”
Li couldn’t imagine life without her, and so, after learning of her friend’s devastating diagnosis, she decided she wasn’t going to be a bystander. For more than 12 years — beginning when she was just 15 — Li has been conducting cystic fibrosis research, from engineering “smart cells” in stem cell therapy to fighting bacterial infections in the lungs. It’s what brought her to Pitt and Carnegie Mellon’s joint MD/PhD program, where she could pursue her CF research while earning her medical degree.
She’s currently working in the lab of Pitt microbiology professor Vaughn Cooper, where she’s custom engineering bacteriophages to fight lung infections for CF patients.
Despite her research ambitions and sudden CEO status, Li has managed to maintain a self-deprecating humor and the lightheartedness that her friend brought out in her all those years ago.
In fact, Korion Health is infused with it, as anyone who has used one of the company’s stethoscopes knows. Upon her insistence, the device is turquoise with a rainbow-colored light, and some storage cases come with panda ears and shark fins to make the kids smile.
“I’m like, ‘Why can’t medicine be cute? It has to be fun and cute. I will die on this hill.’”