A startup team from the University of Wisconsin that moved to San Diego in January to advance their technology for optimizing treatment regimens for cancer patients won the audience vote for best pitch at the EvoNexus Spring Demo Day last week.
Lynx Biosciences founder and CEO Chorom Pak said her startup has developed microfluidic technology that uses live cancer cells to determine how multiple myeloma patients would respond to different treatment regimens. The Wednesday evening pitch event drew several hundred people to an auditorium at Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) corporate headquarters in San Diego.
Pak told the audience the microfluidic device can keep biopsied cancer cells alive for three days in a simulated natural environment that enables scientists to measure their behavior and response to multiple drug combinations. Pak said she has funded development of the technology through $4.3 million in non-dilutive research grants, and LynxBio is now in the process of raising $1.25 million in seed funding.
The startup has been admitted to both the EvoNexus technology incubator and the JLABS innovation program for life sciences startups in San Diego.
A cancer biologist, Pak received her doctorate from UW-Madison in 2013. Pak said she developed the core technology for LynxBio with professor David Beebe, a pioneer in microfluidics and a LynxBio director and scientific advisor.
The EvoNexus incubator, founded in 2009, has become the home for many of San Diego’s most ambitious technology startups. In an effort to move to a more sustainable business model, the incubator that was once free to startups has begun to ask for a small equity stake from each company admitted to its facility.
Here is a quick recap of the other presentations at the event:
—Axalume, a specialist in “silicon photonics,” is developing technologies to address bottlenecks within data centers and high-performance networks that bog
