Qkine and Antiverse have been announced as some of the winners in the Accelerate@Babraham 2018 competition.
Congratulations to Qkine and Antiverse, two companies with close links to our Department, on being announced as winners of the Accelerate@Babraham competition. This competition aims to support the development of science concepts by providing access to equipped communal laboratories, as well as guidance from mentors and introductions to investors.
Qkine, an embedded company in our Department co-founded by group leader Dr Marko Hyvönen and alumnus Dr Catherine Elton, is a specialist manufacturer of proteins that are used for control of stem cell growth and differentiation. Speaking about the award, Catherine said: "This is a superb opportunity to work alongside other start-ups, and access to additional facilities at Babraham will allow us to bring forwards our R&D and commercialisation plans."
Antiverse, co-founded by our former PhD student Dr Rowina Westermeier, is building a computational platform to discover antibody therapeutics in just a single day rather than in the many months it traditionally takes via conventional methods. Rowina commented that: "We will be using the prize and lab space to generate a customised dataset to train our machine learning algorithm and will particularly benefit from the one-to-one mentoring from technology and science experts."
The Accelerate@Babraham competition is run by the Babraham Research Campus to support the Cambridge life science cluster through the provision of access to the campus community and infrastructure without the need to be an established occupier on site. Shortlisted applicants were invited to pitch their starts-ups to a judging panel of business leaders who chose up to five finalists. As winners of the competition, Qkine and Antiverse both receive £20,000 and access to communal and equipped laboratory space at the Babraham Research Campus. Accelerate@Babraham is supported by key partners AstraZeneca, MedImmune, One Nucleus, RxCelerate and Eli Lilly.