Jacqueline Silva and Holly Chapman, PhD students in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, have founded a life science startup called Community Overdose Response & Recovery Effort (CORRE). Their goal is to enable the community to prevent opioid overdose deaths, of which about 100,000 occurred in 2021. Jacqueline and Holly say, "CORRE aims to mitigate this problem by educating the community to safely assess opioid overdoses and administer the overdose reversal medication, naloxone and providing naloxone kits. We provide an application platform that alerts community members to respond to nearby overdoses and allows anonymous 911 reporting. CORRE is the UBER of community emergency response."
Jacqueline and Holly have a passion to combat the current opioid epidemic and strongly believe that people who use opioids can become invaluable members of their community.
Resources such as the BlackStone LaunchPad Big Ideas Award and BlackStone LaunchPad and StartUp Grind 2022 have allowed them to create a website (corre-app.org), train 18 community members on opioid overdose assessment and naloxone administration, and provide naloxone kits to the community.
Jacqueline says, "My favorite part of the process has been empowering the community and witnessing families impacted by opioid misuse truly grateful when given naloxone kits." While Holly says her favorite part is "the growing community support... We have received a lot of positive feedback and many requests to keep expanding our net for education."
They are currently developing their minimum viable product (MVP) and applying for funding. The team hopes to grow this business to the greater Houston area and eventually the US.
Their advice for students looking to follow a similar path: "Don’t be afraid to ask for help, no one expects you to be the experts in all aspects of building a business. More often than not, people want to impart their knowledge and help to grow an entrepreneur community with young upstarts in mind."