Spin-off nominated as high potential start-up

Dec 20, 2022. Actome GmbH, the spin-off of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Freiburg and Hahn-Schickard, has been nominated as a high potential start-up by the European Innovation Council (EIC).

In a highly competitive selection process the European Innovation Council (EIC) has selected 78 high potential European start-ups and SMEs out of more than 1,000 applications. Being one of the successful startups, Actome expects financial support through the EIC-Accelerator program amounting to 2.5 Mio. EUR as a research grant and an additional equity contribution of about 2.3 Mio. EUR *

Actome GmbH is a life-science start-up form Freiburg, Germany adopting digital PCR (dPCR) technology and Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) for the ultra-sensitive measurement of proteins and protein interactions. First products based on the Protein Interaction Coupling (PICO) technology for use on dPCR instruments of QIAGEN have been released already in May this year. Now, the Actome team embarks on developing products for readout by NGS to enable the simultaneous analysis of a large number of proteins and protein interactions in a single assay with hitherto unseen performance.

The European funding program EIC-Accelerator is one of the most demanding and competitive innovation funding programs in Europe. The target group is deep tech start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises that can disruptively change the European market with breakthrough innovations. The Actome team has convinced the expert jury by its patented PICO technology which is based on the detection of single protein molecules and protein interaction complexes by translating protein status into DNA barcodes. The amplified DNA barcodes can either be detected by fluorescent reading (dPCR) or sequencing (NGS). While products based on dPCR readout are already available from the Actome webshop (shop.actome.de), the support by the EIC-Accelerator program will enable the development of new products that can be readout by NGS and thus allow for the detection of a large number of targets. This highly ambitious R&D project is supported by Brussels with a research grant of around 2.5 Mio. EUR and an equity contribution of about 2.3 Mio. EUR.

“While our first products for dPCR have been released on the market in May and are starting to become successful already, the EIC-Accelerator program enables us to go much further: With the support of the EIC, we can now start a project to strive for the simultaneous detection of up to 50 protein targets in smallest sample volumes down to single cells. This analytical performance could enable scientific discoveries and medical innovations like never before.” says Csaba Jeney, co-founder, CEO, and CSO.

“We are extremely proud and honored to be selected for the EIC-Accelerator in such a strong competition! The whole team will do its best to return this trust in our PICO technology by pushing hard for making a real and sustainable impact for the European community” says Peter Koltay, co-founder, CEO, and CMO.

* See the details of the announcement and the list of selected companies here:
https://eic.ec.europa.eu/news/european-innovation-council-welcomes-78-high-potential-start-ups-and-smes-highly-competitive-2022-12-19_en

About Actome GmbH
Actome is a privately held young life-science startup founded in 2017. The year before Dr. Jeney moved from Budapest to Freiburg to partner with Dr. Koltay and to leverage his start-up experience and the excellent environment provided by the University of Freiburg and the Hahn-Schickard research institute in Freiburg. Actome provides assay kits, bioinformatics software and services for the sensitive, highly parallel and quantitative measurement of proteins and protein interactions. The long term vision of Actome is to decode the whole interactome - which is the complete set of all protein interaction in a biological organism - and to exploit these discoveries in pharmaceutical and molecular diagnostic products for personalized medicine. Actome’s first products target the research market in the field of molecular biology with a specific focus on assay-kits for multi-omics and single cell analysis.
www.actome.de

Contact

Dr. Philipp Lübbert
Marketing & Business Development
Actome GmbH
Georges-Köhler-Allee 103
Phone: +49 761 216305 07
E-Mail: philipp.luebbert@actome.de

 

Kerstin Steiger-Merx
Representative PR/Marketing
Faculty of Engineering
University of Freiburg
Phone: 0761/203-8056
E-Mail: steiger-merx@tf.uni-freiburg.de