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Award success for Cambridge Social Ventures

12 November 2015

The article at a glance

Two ventures supported by Cambridge Social Ventures, a collaboration between the Centre for Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School and the …

Two ventures supported by Cambridge Social Ventures, a collaboration between the Centre for Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School and the charity Allia, have recently won coveted awards in their respective fields.

AwardOn 21 October GeneAdviser, a social enterprise making genetic testing for rare diseases more accessible to clinicians around the world, was named a winner of the Cambridge Wireless Discovering Start-Ups competition.

Hosted by Deloitte in London, the competition now in its sixth year gives start-ups the chance to pitch their work to London investors and to network with potential business partners and customers. Finalists pitched their ideas, technologies, and innovative products to a judging panel of 29 business leaders and investors from companies including Deloitte UK, Google, BT, IBM and Samsung.

Following on from this success, GeneAdviser announced that its first partner laboratory will be the NHS Genomic Medicine Centre at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. The company is now working closely with Addenbrooke’s to finalise the platform, integrate systems and train staff, and expect to soon take their first orders for genetic tests from doctors across the world.

This partnership follows 12 months of collaboration to design a system that closely matches the needs of a large public genetic testing facility, and which could be easily rolled out to the other 11 Genomic Medicine Centres in the NHS.

The second venture to win an award is Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS), a medical devices company making a dedicated connector for amputated limbs to take the pain out of prostheses and give device choice back to the amputees that need them. On 23 October they were named as a winner of the MassChallenge 2015 at an award ceremony held in London, taking home the top prize of £50,000.

In 2015, over 2,250 startups applied to MassChallenge accelerators in Boston and London. CBAS was named one of six diamond award winners from 90 finalists to take part in MassChallenge UK accelerator, which provided mentorship, office space, a vast network and other resources during four months of acceleration.