What started back in 2004 as a three-person start-up may well be on its way to becoming a multi-million euro success story. Advanced by a team of young Dutch scientists pushing disruptive biotech innovations onto the market, the SME FlexGen is attracting the attention of some key investors and demonstrating the added value that public support can offer to innovative SMES, with the Eurostars funding programme leading the way.
The dynamic Netherlands-based company specialises in the sequencing of the human genome. Nothing new so far, as a complete mapping of human DNA was achieved in 2004. FlexGen was created the same year and, since then, the original founds have gambled on a few emerging trends that may well lead this start-up to become a benchmark in the field.
For the past few years, FlexGen has been leading a consortium formed together with the University Hospital of Leiden in the Netherlands and Molecular Stamping, an Italian SME created by MIT scholar Francesco Stellacci. The group worked on a project called 'Arrayvolution', developed under the auspices of Eurostars, the first European funding programme to be specifically dedicated to research-performing SMEs.
The results of the project are already being applied in Europe, the United States and Canada. By rapidly and cheaply analysing the genomes of large populations, the technology helps to find the genetic cause of diseases and studies the reaction of the human body to different types of treatment. Thanks to those findings, it is possible to better understand the causes of a malady and to better adapt medical prescription to the patient.
An untapped potential
Arrayvolution takes an innovative approach to genetic sequencing. Previously, most efforts in the field concentrated on sequencing an entire human genome: a cumbersome and costly procedure. As a consequence, DNA analysis has been for a long time the privilege of laboratories oriented towards academic researc
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| Contact: Piotr Pogorzelski piotr.pogorzelski@eurekanetwork.org 32-277-70979 EUREKA Source:Eurekalert |
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