RNA-Seq Blog Transcriptome Research & Industry News
Breakout Labs, the Thiel Foundation’s seed-stage fund for deep technology companies, announced its latest four investments, each propelling radical science and technology to improve human health. The new awards bring the total number of companies backed by Breakout Labs to 34 since the program’s first investments in 2012.
“The four new companies joining our portfolio are building on major discoveries at the intersections of biology and technology — areas where science is pushing deeper into unchartered territory, but commercialization often fails to keep pace,” said Lindy Fishburne, Executive Director of Breakout Labs. “The teams at Envisagenics, Gel4Med, LogicInk and SciBac show that while discovery research is critical, it is the risk-taking scientist-entrepreneurs who will make scientific breakthroughs transformational for the world.”
Reducing the complexity of big data in biotech
New York City-based Envisagenics (http://www.envisagenics.com/) is a bioinformatics company spinout of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which has created a software platform to help drug makers develop better drugs by replacing manual work with machine-learning algorithms. Their technology, SpliceCore, analyzes large amounts of transcriptomic data from patients to discover genes affected by errors in alternative splicing found in cancer and genetic diseases.
“DNA and RNA sequencing has revolutionized medical research–these data could be the key to unlocking cures for countless diseases—but the technology has quickly created an abundance of data that is difficult to analyze. Our platform will enable efficient analysis of complex data for the discovery of new drug targets,” said Maria Luisa Pineda, CEO of Envisagenics. “This investment will allow us to broaden the impact of our analytical tools, while we also reaping the benefits of Breakout Labs’ unparalleled community,” said Pineda.
About Breakout Labs
Breakout Labs is a seed-stage revolving fund operating out of the Thiel Foundation, backing bold scientist-entrepreneurs at the intersections of technology, biology, materials and energy. It supports early stage companies as they transition radical scientific discoveries out of the lab and into the market. More than capital, Breakout Labs provides access to an elite ecosystem of follow-on funders, corporate partners and resources to drive commercialization.
To date, portfolio companies have raised 15 times Breakout Labs’ investment; eight companies have gone on to raise Series A, two have closed Series B rounds and one has been acquired.
The entire portfolio of Breakout Labs companies can be viewed at www.breakoutlabs.org/portfolio.
Source – BusinessWire
