When the nominees for the 2023 Prix Galien USA Awards for Best Startup were announced in late summer, it was no surprise to find a few familiar names on the list of the best and most innovative life science organizations in the nation.
“We couldn’t be prouder or more excited to see these companies getting the attention and recognition they deserve,” says Vincent Bologna, CEO and Co-Founder of BioProcure. “We know the level of passion and effort they put into their work. It’s a pleasure to follow the success of our client companies as they strive to improve health outcomes worldwide.”
Included on the list of nominees for Best Startup are Affini-T Therapeutics, Ascidian Therapeutics, Cellarity, Flare Therapeutics, Generate Biomedicines, and LifeMine Therapeutics. Read on to learn more about the innovative achievements being made by these six change-making organizations.
Since its launch in 2020, Affini-T Therapeutics has been on the front lines of T cell receptor engineered TCR-T therapies. They’ve created proprietary and differentiated T cell receptor engineered T cell (TCR-T) therapy-enabling platforms TAILOR™, TUNE™, and THRIVE™, which, according to the Affini-T website, “harness state-of-the-art engineering, synthetic biology, and manufacturing technologies to optimize T cell function in the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, aiming at sustained clinical responses in patients with solid tumors.” Affini-T Therapeutics is making enormous strides in treating solid tumors with the science of T cells.
Ascidian Therapeutics drew its inspiration to rewrite RNA from ascidians – also known as sea squirts. To grow from larvae to adults, ascidians re-engineer their transcriptome through RNA trans-splicing and alternative splicing. Ascidian’s technology enables the replacement of mutated exons in large genes and genes with high mutational variance while maintaining native gene expression patterns and levels.
In Ascidian’s labs, RNA biology meets today’s cutting-edge genomics, computational biology, and deep-sequencing technologies to create a new class of medicines that address the underlying causes of disease. Learn more by visiting Ascidian Therapeutics | A sea change in RNA therapeutics (ascidian-tx.com).
Cellarity—a first-of-its-kind therapeutics company—was launched by Flagship Pioneering in 2019 to develop medicines by studying and altering the cellular signatures of disease. Cellarity is on a mission to
increase the success of drug discovery by harnessing their unique ability to create drugs through the lens of the entire cell. In this manner, this groundbreaking company plans to address the presently intractable diseases for which druggable targets are currently unknown. Learn more on the Cellarity website.
Named one of Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces in 2023, Flare Therapeutics is a team on a mission “to conquer transcription factors and create cutting-edge medicines for patients.”
Flare is shedding light on a new therapeutic space by its innovative approach to deciphering the biology of transcription factors to develop small molecule medicines. Flare’s team is harnessing the power of ‘switch sites’ as druggable regions that hold the control for predictable and profound changes in DNA transcription, and therefore, gene expression. Read more about Flare’s pipeline of drug programs at Pipeline – Flare Therapeutics | Flare Therapeutics (flaretx.com).
Generate:Biomedicines is a clinical-stage biotherapeutics company pioneering a machine-learning-powered generative biology platform with the ability to create new drugs on demand. The Generate Platform – which is used to generate, build, measure, and learn – can drastically decrease the time it takes to target, identify, and validate therapeutics, improve the specificity of target engagement by generated proteins, and reduce the time and cost of identifying and developing clinical candidates. Read more at Generate Biomedicines
LifeMine’s Avatar-Rx platform integrates high-throughput microbiology, data science, machine learning, genome engineering and automation technologies to search the fungal biosphere for genetically-encoded small molecules (GEMs) that engage human targets. By searching for GEMs algorithmically in genomic space rather than physically in chemical space, LifeMine has created a revolutionary drug discovery engine that is, according to the LifeMine website, “poised to deliver a pipeline of novel medicines that will conquer previously unconquerable human diseases.”
Since 2007, the Prix Galien USA has been America’s preeminent prize acknowledging the leading-edge of scientific advances in life sciences. According to the Galien Foundation website, “The Prix Galien was created in 1970 in honor of Galien, the father of medical science and modern pharmacology by the French Pharmacist, Roland Mehl to recognize outstanding achievements in improving the global human condition through the development of innovative drugs, technologies, and other treatments. The Prix Galien is the world’s highest independent distinction that awards the most critical products introduced in the public market and achievements of the best research teams in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical technology, and digital health industries, and is regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in biopharmaceutical research.” Read more about The Galien Foundation and the Prix Galien.