Introducing the Spring 2020 FAST Companies

Five life science startups, vetted and selected by a distinguished review panel, will join CLSI’s Spring 2020 Fellows All-Star Team (FAST) Advisory Program. The Spring 2020 FAST cohort includes:

• Respira Labs – working on improving Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) care through a smartphone-based attack-detection platform that can quantitatively measure lung function deterioration using smart acoustics and Machine Learning
• Immulus – developing GMP manufacturing process for platform technology for use in T cell therapy biomanufacture
• ARIZ Precision Medicine – developing potentially curative therapeutics that selectively deliver fatal genetic messages to cancer cells while at the same time sparing healthy cells
• Argonaut Genomics – developing novel cancer antigens for immunotherapies including therapeutic cancer vaccines and cell therapies.
• NeuScience – developing transformative phenotypic screens to target solid tumor cancers

Each company founder will be paired with a team of 10 to 12 advisors who will meet with them over 12 weeks in group advisory sessions. These meetings culminate in a final FAST Showcase on June 16 to a broad audience of industry professionals, entrepreneurs and potential investors.

Now halfway through its seventh year, FAST was developed to help some of the most innovative young life science companies FAST-track their way to funding and success. FAST’s 69 company graduates have received over 7300 volunteer advisory hours valued at over $1,600,000, have collectively raised over $1 billion and have tripled their workforce, creating 397 new jobs since their participation in FAST.