SpinUp welcomes first group of early-stage startups for incubation
Mississauga, ON — April 2024
SpinUp is pleased to introduce our first group of startups, comprised of 10 diverse and exciting teams working in the health, chemical, and life sciences. Supported by a range of facilities and services campuswide, these companies will soon move into the University of Toronto Mississauga’s (UTM) New Science Building. They’ll have the infrastructure, equipment, and programming to further develop their intellectual property (IP) and prepare for their next stages of growth — all within a strong entrepreneurship ecosystem offered by the City of Mississauga and the University of Toronto.
“Welcoming our first group of startups is a significant milestone for all of us,” says SpinUp Director Raquel De Souza, who has been working closely with the startups during the onboarding process. “We look forward to kickstarting the SpinUp program to support our ecosystem’s early-stage startups with much-needed wet lab space and resources.”
Meet our startups founded by U of T students, alumni, faculty, and founders supported by an external partner program.
Acanthus Pharma
Acanthus Pharma Services Inc. provides innovative solutions to drug delivery systems based on lipid nanoparticles technology. We develop novel customized lipids from concept to clinic, building an offering for a wide range of applications, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and cosmetic. We utilize state-of-the-art analytical technology to ensure high-purity products for all future applications.
Meet the team: Stefan Wodzinski, Ph.D. President & CEO; John Tobin, Ph.D. Head of Operations; Tony G. Thomas, Ph.D., Group Leader; Louise Edwards, Ph.D. Senior Scientist; Peter Dove, M.Sc. Synthetic Chemist; Andrew Wozniak, B.Sc., Synthetic Chemist
Visit the Acanthus Pharma website.
Ardra
Ardra is a precision fermentation company creating novel and natural food ingredients to address challenges in sustainable food production. We cater to emerging markets such as flavours, colours, plant-based meat alternatives, and health and nutrition. Our current portfolio includes animal-free heme, a quintessential meat flavour ingredient; leaf aldehyde, a natural fruit flavour ingredient; and R-BDO, a non-sugar energy source used in sports nutrition.
Our core technology involves designer microorganisms cultivated in fermenters to convert sugars into target natural ingredients.
Meet the team: Pratish Gawand, Co-founder and CEO; Olga Zaslaver, Senior Scientist; Davinder Lall, Fermentation Specialist; Mabel Wong, Operations Manager
Arma Biosciences
Arma Biosciences is developing a new sensor technology for biomarker-informed digital healthcare. Sensors can be designed for a multitude of applications in chronic disease, infectious disease, and wellness monitoring, and can detect biomarkers in multiple biofluids. Arma’s current focus is a handheld finger-prick blood test for patients with heart failure, enabling the user to monitor key biomarker levels from home. Future products will include wearable, implantable, and ingestible sensors for continuous monitoring applications.
Meet the team: Surath Gomis, Director of R&D and Co-Founder; Divya Dave, Research Scientist; Vishal Kale, Research Scientist; Annabelle Zhang, Research Technician
Atorvia
Atorvia is pre-clinical stage biotech company developing treatments for organ failure by targeting the regulated cell death pathways that cause it. Starting with the kidney, a first-in-class therapeutic is in development to prevent kidney failure during cardiac surgery, a common and serious complication. There is currently no treatment available for it.
Meet the team: Jane Lapon, CEO; Mridul Nair, Director Translational and Clinical Science; Steven Borkan, Scientific Adviser; Nermeen Varawalla, Chair Medical Advisory Committee; David Allinson, Chief Business Officer
Bough Biosciences
When overwhelmed with stress, cells can enter a zombie-like state known as senescence. The build-up of these cells in the brain has been linked to several neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases, among others. Bough Biosciences will develop a novel approach to the discovery of drugs that will remove these senescent cells called senolytics, using a technology called single cell-RNA sequencing to understand what causes the build-up of these cells in different disease states.
Understanding these features allows us to model disease-specific cellular senescence in a petri dish outside the human body and identify potent compounds specific for the senescent cells in neurological and neuropsychiatric disease.
Meet the founder: Ben Kolisnyk, Founder and CEO
Diaminopharm
Diaminopharm is a chemical manufacturing start-up that uses our proprietary diamine platform for the expedited synthesis of functional libraries. We specialize in generating libraries of catalysts, artificial peptides, and organic materials. By rapid screening of our libraries through a combination of automation and artificial intelligence, we aim to accelerate the discovery of next-generation materials and catalysts.
Meet the team: Jik Chin, Chief Executive Officer; Rick Fu, Board Member; Daniel Lee, Staff Scientist; Lenny Chen, Chief Scientific Officer
Epiloid
Epiloid provides preclinical functional testing of neurotherapeutics in 3D human brain organoid constructs, including electrophysiological and transcriptomic analysis. Our mission is to de-risk preclinical testing through enhancing human translational insights.
Meet the team: Mark Aquilino, Chief Executive Officer; Clara Robson, Chief Operating Officer; Justin Babin, Lead, Business Development and Strategy; Merlit Mathew, Business Development Associate
ImmunoBiochem
ImmunoBiochem is on a mission to develop novel bioconjugate therapeutics, such ADCs, ISACs and DACs, to address significant unmet need in oncology, immuno-oncology and immunology. In precision oncology and immuno-oncology, ImmunoBiochem focuses on the discovery of novel tumor secretome-based targets utilizing a combination of high-throughput functional assays, mass spectrometry and AI/ML to unravel unique cancer biology. In precision immunology, ImmunoBiochem’s novel bioconjugates utilize unique antibody targets for the delivery of potent protein degrader payloads modulating select immunological pathways in specific cell subtypes in the desirable context in relevant autoimmune disorders, avoiding broad side-effects of existing biologics and small molecule therapeutics.
Meet the team: Anton Neschadim, CEO, Director & Founder; Tian Sun, Scientist, Immuno-Oncology
Mesosil
Mesosil develops and manufactures antimicrobial and bioactive additives for dental and medical materials. Dental treatments like fillings have very high failure rates due to reinfection, and manufacturers have few ways to compete in a crowded marketplace. By partnering with device manufacturers, Mesosil enhances the material’s survivability without altering performance or use, providing manufacturers with field leading capabilities and clinicians and patients with truly permanent solutions to some of the world’s most common diseases.
Meet the team: Cameron Stewart, CEO; Neda Aslankoohi, Lead Research Scientist; Usha Kabilan, Research and Quality Scientist; Minhang Gao, Research Technician; Qin Ji, Research Scientist; Zach Gouveia, Research Scientist
MycoFutures
MycoFutures is a next-gen materials innovation startup creating a circular and low carbon mycelium-based leather alternative. Our material is animal-free, plastic-free and non-toxic, so the things we use every day can be better for people and the planet.
Meet the team: Stephanie Lipp, CEO & Co-founder; Leo Gillis, CTO & Co-founder
Preparations are underway to launch SpinUp’s programming in the coming weeks, which has been tailored to our startups and their stage of development. We warmly invite our community to join us for our launch event, which will take place on the UTM campus this fall.
Please visit our website and contact our team with any questions at spinup@utoronto.ca.
Purpose-built to drive life science innovation, SpinUp is the first wet lab incubator at the University of Toronto, Canada’s leading centre for learning and discovery and one of the world’s top-two universities for health science productivity. SpinUp offers early-stage start-ups access to outstanding wet lab space, equipment, and expertise at U of T Mississauga. SpinUp is part of U of T entrepreneurship, a network of 12+ innovation accelerators that has supported more than 650 capital-backed companies, which have created 9,000 jobs and raised $2.5 billion in external investment over the past ten years.
Media Contact
U of T Mississauga:
Patricia Lonergan
Interim Director, Marketing and Communications