Startups Reducing the Cost of Transcriptomics Studies, Developing Tissue-Engineered Implants Which can Grow With the Patient, and a Point-Of-Care Regenerative Medicine Solution Each win CHF 40,000

Alithea Genomics: cost-efficient transcriptomics solutions for biomedical research and the pharmaceutical industry

Alithea Genomics: EPFL's spin-off Alithea Genomics was launched by Daniel Alpern, PhD, CEO, Riccardo Dainese, PhD, CTO and Bart Deplancke, PhD, co-founder and scientific advisor, to address the need of academic and industrial biomedical R&D labs, drug screening facilities of pharma companies and biobanks to analyze large sets of samples, transforming them into actionable molecular data. The high cost of sample preparation for next-generation RNA  sequencing is still restrictive and hindering the adaptation of transcriptomics in studies involving multitudes of samples including high-throughput drug screening or biomarker discovery. To address this, Alithea Genomics is developing cost-efficient, large-scale transcriptomics solutions for biomedical and pharmaceutical research focused on biomarker discovery and drug development, thereby enabling  fundamental and clinical research projects that were economically and practically unfeasible before. Alithea Genomics’ main focus is thus to provide R&D platforms with more complete high content actionable data, therefore rendering biobank functionalization and drug screening efforts more amenable to insightful discoveries.

With the Venture Kick funds, Alithea Genomics will prepare for the rollout of their first kit, which will already enable 10x higher throughput as compared to competing solutions.

LifeMatrix: Biomimetic Cardiovascular Solutions for Life

Globally, one out of 100 children is born with a heart defect. In severe cases the diseased cardiovascular tissue needs to be replaced surgically. The currently used synthetic or animal derived materials do not grow or regenerate with the patient and therefore cause severe clinical problems and need to be replaced several times throughout the patient’s lifetime.

LifeMatrix is active in the fast-growing field of “medical biomimetics” and has developed a unique tissue engineering technology to grow human replacement tissues in the laboratory as next generation implants for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. The patented LifeMatrix tissues can be manufactured as heart valves, blood vessels and other cardiovascular structures. When implanted, the patient's own cells will transform the LifeMatrix tissue into living heart valves and blood vessels which can grow and regenerate with the patient. The LifeMatrix implants are off-the-shelf products, scalable, cost-effective, non-immunogenic and therefore applicable to every patient. The disruptive LifeMatrix technology has the potential to overcome the significant limitations of existing implants and revolutionize the medical device industry. Developed at the University of Zurich, the award winning LifeMatrix technology platform is backed by >20 years of research with >100 peer-reviewed publications and a strong patent portfolio. The team around Prof. Maximilian Emmert, Rene Stenger (co-founders) and Robin Müller (Project Manager) is dedicated to drive the clinical translation of the technology forward and to bring biomimetic cardiovascular solutions to the patient. LifeMatrix is currently supported by the Wyss Zurich, a joint accelerator of the ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. Thanks to the VentureKick funds the team aims at accelerating the process of spinning out the technology from the University and preparing a Series A financing round.