We recently marked a fantastic conclusion to our second Cancer Tech Accelerator cohort, with six outstanding teams pitching at the demo day we hosted on the rooftop deck of London’s National Theatre. It was a great event with strong turnout from the life sciences and investor community, and we are proud of the strides they have made in turning their research into commercial solutions.
We heard from Lyndsay Hughes on the pioneering work done by myHT, a mobile app to support breast cancer survivors to take their medication. With more than half (!) of medication not being taken correctly, myHT has shown huge progress in increasing adherence and improving outcomes.
Sentinal 4D, led by Chris Bakal and Matt De Vries, uses 3D + AI technology to predict the likelihood of success of novel therapeutics in clinical trials, thus saving years and huge amounts of money in the drug discovery pipeline. With new cancer drugs often spending 12-14 years in development, this is an area crying out for acceleration.
Richard Mair talked us through the value proposition for his company, Upstream Genomics, which aims to detect cancer recurrence and metastasis early through urine sampling. By using a state-of-the-art bioinformatics pipeline to look for traces of cell-free DNA, they are able to monitor cancer survivors for recurrence more cheaply and easily than the current standard of care.
Maria Giovanna Lizio of WILD Imaging told us about the solution she has developed in response to the NHS’s chronic shortage of pathologists – a new imaging device to allow faster diagnosis and treatment, with an initial focus on lung cancer margins before exploring other applications.
Vlad Teif talked us through a new generation of liquid biopsy techniques he is developing with Generegulation for early cancer detection and monitoring patient response, with a view to reducing the high costs of tissue biopsies.
Last but not least we heard from Peter Bannister, Davide Danovi and Kristin Polman about their work with Migration Biotherapeutics to create a bioengineered decoy nerve to combat glioblastoma, one of the deadliest and most difficult to treat types of brain cancer.
Thanks to all the teams for their hard work, and a big thank you as well to everyone in the audience who asked some excellent questions afterwards!
