Startups Revolutionizing G Protein Coupled Receptors Screening, Developing Next-Generation Microscopes Slides, Oral Microbiome Therapies to Treat Chronic Kidney Disease, and Digitizing Humans Each win CHF 10,000
24.08.2020
ArcoScreen, Luminesys, REN Therapeutics, and VAY win Venture Kick's first stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their projects help doctors save time by drastically reducing the assay time in GPCR screening from hours to minutes, improve up to 25 times the brightness of fluorescent markers, prevent the progression of chronic kidney disease without the contraindications of current treatments, and give everyone access to athlete-grade motion analysis.
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 ArcoScreen's CEO and co-founder Margaux Duchamp
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 Luminesys' co-founders Nicolas Descharmes and Raphaël Barbey
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 REN Therapeutics' CEO and founder Rikke C. Nielsen
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 VAY's CEO Joel Roos
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ArcoScreen: revolutionizing G protein coupled receptors screening
G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the most successful drug targets to treat diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Current assays to find new drugs are limited. ArcoScreen's team based at EPFL- Margaux Duchamp, CEO, co-founder and PhD in bio engineering with emphasis on micro technologies, Thamani Dahoun, CTO, co-founder, PhD in chemistry with a specialization in GPCR, Lucas Yerly, R&D engineer and Philippe Renaud as advisor - aims at revolutionizing GPCR drug screening with a new assay embedded in a microfluidic chip. Their solution SynScreen revolutionizes GPCR screening by drastically reducing the assay time from hours to minutes by combining 4 tests in a unique and simple assay. They target Pharma companies that are interested in uncovering novel applications for already existing drugs. They have currently a functional microfluidic device and have validated their novel approach against current state of the art methods. Their product SynScreen qualifies as a pharmaceutical laboratory equipment and is a GPCR drug discovery tool. The worldwide market for such tools is estimated to reach 1.76B$ in revenue by 2022 (CAGR 3.6%).
G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the most successful drug targets to treat diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Current assays to find new drugs are limited. ArcoScreen's team based at EPFL- Margaux Duchamp, CEO, co-founder and PhD in bio engineering with emphasis on micro technologies, Thamani Dahoun, CTO, co-founder, PhD in chemistry with a specialization in GPCR, Lucas Yerly, R&D engineer and Philippe Renaud as advisor - aims at revolutionizing GPCR drug screening with a new assay embedded in a microfluidic chip. Their solution SynScreen revolutionizes GPCR screening by drastically reducing the assay time from hours to minutes by combining 4 tests in a unique and simple assay. They target Pharma companies that are interested in uncovering novel applications for already existing drugs. They have currently a functional microfluidic device and have validated their novel approach against current state of the art methods. Their product SynScreen qualifies as a pharmaceutical laboratory equipment and is a GPCR drug discovery tool. The worldwide market for such tools is estimated to reach 1.76B$ in revenue by 2022 (CAGR 3.6%).
Venture Kick financing will enable the team to further work on theri business model as well as the validation of their microfluidic device with novel GPCR screening method, to achieve a proof of concept of a compound screening in a specific therapeutic area like diabetes and Alzheimer's, and to develop a prototype for the SynScreen instrument. arcoscreen.ch
Luminesys: Next-generation microscope slides
REN Therapeutics: Oral microbiome therapies to treat chronic kidney disease.
Luminesys: Next-generation microscope slides
The precise identification of many life-impacting pathologies such as cancer and autoimmune diseases often involves fluorescence-based analyses. Although well-established, fluorescence imaging is a technique that often suffers from the weakness of the available light to measure. The later imposes long time-to-answers, tedious amplification mechanisms and advanced read-out equipment, which all-in-all reduce the practicality of these analyses. Nicolas Descharmes, postdoc at EPFL and Raphaël Barbey, senior R&D engineer at CSEM, co-founded Luminesys to provide coated microscopy slides for fluorescence-based medical analyses and molecular biology applications to doctors, scientists and researchers who wish to decrease their time-to-answer, improve the quality of their data and, in fine, improve the reliability of their analyses. They estimate that over 20 million slides are used for fluorescence analyses every year worldwide. They have contacted and visited several tens of laboratories, hospitals and companies, produced >1500 slides and are currently testing some of them in real-case customer specific applications. Four distinct private companies have already manifested an interest in the Luminesys technology.
The Venture Kick funds will be used to sustain their sales and marketing effort, to reach out to the medical and pharmaceutical community and to consolidate their business model. luminesys.ch
REN Therapeutics: Oral microbiome therapies to treat chronic kidney disease.
World-wide more than 800 million patients are suffering from chronic kidney disease (CDK). The disease causes a decline in kidney function that may ultimately result in the need for dialysis and kidney transplant. REN Therapeutics founded by CEO Rikke C Nielsen, with Nils Hijlkema as Outsourcing and Operations Manager, is a spin-out of BEO Therapeutics that has an academic link to ETHZ and that develops microbiome treatments counteract diseases caused by modern lifestyle.
REN Therapeutics first product is a drug that will prevent the progression of CDK without the contraindications of current treatments. The innovation lies in the combination of two or more novel live bacteria that are selected for their effect on uremic toxins. The bacteria have in vitro shown to increase degradation of uremic toxin with 600% and inhibit the production of toxin with up to 100%.
The financing from Venture Kick will be used be used to consolidate the business case including a better understanding of the chronic kidney disease area, the active players in the field and the financial plan, and later to progress the research to obtain pre-clinical data from a rat model.
REN Therapeutics first product is a drug that will prevent the progression of CDK without the contraindications of current treatments. The innovation lies in the combination of two or more novel live bacteria that are selected for their effect on uremic toxins. The bacteria have in vitro shown to increase degradation of uremic toxin with 600% and inhibit the production of toxin with up to 100%.
The financing from Venture Kick will be used be used to consolidate the business case including a better understanding of the chronic kidney disease area, the active players in the field and the financial plan, and later to progress the research to obtain pre-clinical data from a rat model.
VAY: Human Motion Analysis
Computer Vision is a technology too new and too hard to grasp for most businesses to get their fingers burned on. At the same time, a lot of people realise that it is out there and start thinking of possible applications. VAY co-founders - Joel Roos, CEO and Master in Robotics ETH, Patrizio Bonzani, CTO, Master in Computer Science ETH, and Ben A. Simon, CFO, Master in Accounting & Finance HSG - are working solely on their core technology, computer vision Motion Analysis. Their service provides the most precise and reliable hardware-independent Human Pose Estimation algorithms. It works with any camera and creates a computer model of the human body in real-time. The team have created an automated analysis of any metrics and can provide the relevant ones to their customers. As they see hundreds if not thousands of applications emerging over the next 5 years, they want to become the main enabler of all those applications by serving their technology as B2B Software Licensing, pursuing their goal to democratize professional motion analysis and facilitate prevention, diagnosis, and rehabilitation of musculoskeletal disorders.
Computer Vision is a technology too new and too hard to grasp for most businesses to get their fingers burned on. At the same time, a lot of people realise that it is out there and start thinking of possible applications. VAY co-founders - Joel Roos, CEO and Master in Robotics ETH, Patrizio Bonzani, CTO, Master in Computer Science ETH, and Ben A. Simon, CFO, Master in Accounting & Finance HSG - are working solely on their core technology, computer vision Motion Analysis. Their service provides the most precise and reliable hardware-independent Human Pose Estimation algorithms. It works with any camera and creates a computer model of the human body in real-time. The team have created an automated analysis of any metrics and can provide the relevant ones to their customers. As they see hundreds if not thousands of applications emerging over the next 5 years, they want to become the main enabler of all those applications by serving their technology as B2B Software Licensing, pursuing their goal to democratize professional motion analysis and facilitate prevention, diagnosis, and rehabilitation of musculoskeletal disorders.
The Venture Kick funding is used to launch a case study with physiotherapists and movement scientists to create an automated physical assessment training program with individual prevention recommendations based on the results. vay.ai