Illumina has chosen seven companies to join the first global cohort of Illumina Accelerator, its startup incubator that partners with entrepreneurs to build genomics startups.
Of the seven companies, three will mark the inaugural funding cycle of Illumina Accelerator Cambridge, U.K., while four other firms will join as part of the eleventh funding cycle in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to Illumina.
The companies based at Illumina Accelerator Cambridge are as follows:
- Alchemab Therapeutics: an antibody therapeutics company from London harnessing patient antibodies for drug discovery and development
- Neurolytic Healthcare: a diagnostic company from Oxford developing digital, genomics-driven diagnostics and personalized treatment recommendations for neurological conditions
- Tailor Bio: an oncology diagnostics company spun out of Cancer Research UK-funded research developing a precision oncology platform to identify patterns in tumor DNA and predict a patient's response to cancer drugs
The firms based at Illumina Accelerator SF Bay Area are as follows:
- AarogyaAI Innovations: a diagnostics company from India developing technology for rapid diagnosis of drug resistance in tuberculosis
- Medic Life Sciences: a drug discovery company in the San Francisco Bay Area building a preclinical testbed of tumor samples based on CRISPR and cancer organoids to enable personalized targeted therapies
- Pluton Biosciences: a microbial testing and discovery research company in St. Louis developing eco-friendly natural products to replace synthetic chemical applications in agriculture and pest control
- WellSim Biomedical Technologies: a tools company from the San Francisco Bay Area developing a microfluidics-based automated exosome processing instrument for therapeutic and clinical diagnostics applications
