ELRIG Drug Discovery 2021 Hosts Six SLAS Innovation AveNEW Companies

Oak Brook, IL (October 19, 2021) – The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) will host its popular Innovation AveNEW for startups at Drug Discovery 2021 in Liverpool, UK on October 19-20. Presented by The European Laboratory Research & Innovation Group (ELRIG), Drug Discovery 2021 returns to an in-person meeting format with a mission to engage quality discussions on key issues and future directions in preclinical drug discovery.

SLAS’s Innovation AveNEW showcases start-up companies with innovative solutions and tools for the life sciences research community, providing a venue to elevate their presence and promote their new technologies. Companies are reviewed by a panel who are evaluated on technical merit, commercial feasibility, and compelling science and technology. One company has been selected to participate in either the SLAS2022 International Conference & Exhibition in Boston, MA (February 5 - 9, 2022) or the SLAS Europe 2022 Conference and Exhibition in Dublin, Ireland (May 24 – 27, 2022). There, the featured company will have the opportunity to vie for the SLAS Ignite Award, which carries a cash prize, business consulting and ongoing publicity.

The companies participating in SLAS’s Innovation AveNEW at Drug Discovery 2021 are:

HexagonFab (Cambridge, UK | Zurich, Switzerland)

HexagonFab, the winning Innovation AveNEW company, is on a mission to democratize protein characterization by making it more affordable, easier to use and faster than ever before. Driven by advances in nanotechnology, microelectronics and advanced algorithms, HexagonFab has developed a unique approach to protein and small molecule analysis for pharmaceutical and manufacturing.

AlveoliX AG (Bern, Switzerland)

AlveoliX aims to make organs-to-chip technology the new standard for preclinical decision-making and bring data for bench to clinic, making drug discovery safer, better and personalized. AlveoliX develops organs-on-chip by combining expertise in microfluids and cell biology, inspired by the patterns of nature.

BBD BioPhenix USA LLC - Biobide USA (Cambridge, MA, USA)

Biobide accelerates the research and development process through their time and cost-effective zebrafish services, developing toxicity and efficacy assays and disease models for preclinical stage use. The company has developed a fully automated platform to reproduce the manual process of screening in a 96-well plate format in vivo with zebrafish embryos.

Celtarys Research (A Coruña, Spain)

Celtarys Research develops and commercializes new chemical tools to spread the use of fluorescence-based methods in drug discovery, designed to fill the gap in current available tools for use in high-throughput screening.

LevitasBio Inc. (Menlo Park, CA, USA)

The LeviCell, LevitasBio’s platform that purifies cells and nuclei in minutes without markers or modifications, delivers simple, label-free cell separation in a fast, reliable and gentle workflow to prepare samples for better results.

Lightspeed Microscopy (Seattle, WA, USA)

Lightspeed Microscopy provides a full-stack solution to nondestructively image large tissues in 3D at sub-cellular resolution. The company utilizes their novel chemistry, patented high-throughput light-sheet microscope and cloud-based AI software to add a new dimension to pathology analysis.

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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and the developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

ELRIG UK is a not-for-profit organization, based in the UK, bringing together academic and biopharma industry experts and thought leaders to exchange ideas and information. Their primary objective is to provide outstanding, leading-edge knowledge to the life sciences community on an open access basis. With more than 7,000 life science professionals across the UK and Europe, their members include scientists, researchers, engineers, developers and businesspeople within academia, industry, government organizations and private institutes.

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