CEO Päivi Saavalainen at SCellex (to the right) receiving the winning check after Y Science Health Pitching Competition.
Helsinki-based biotech startup SCellex took home the first prize of €5,000 in the Health Pitching Competition at Y Science, an official side event of Slush. Let’s go back to the event in November 2022 and hear the story of SCellex, as told by the founder Päivi Saavalainen.
Juha Paakkola, Director of Health Capital Helsinki, presenting the Helsinki Metropolitan health ecosystem.
Y Science is where life science innovation meets with the business world at Slush, the world’s leading startup event taking place yearly in Helsinki. Y Science gathers the life science community – researchers, early-stage companies and aspiring teams – to hear interesting key notes and panel discussions, and to network. An essential element of the event are the pitching competition finals where early-stage startups and pre-startups are evaluated by a prestigious panel of judges.
The four finalists of the 2022 Health Pitching Competition were:
Before the final pitch on Y Science stage, the finalists received coaching to polish their pitch. After the event, all four finalists were awarded with mentorship from the AstraZeneca mentor network.
Päivi Saavalainen making the winning pitch on SCellex at the Y Science Health Pitching Competition final.
The winner of the 2022 Health Pitching Competition was Helsinki-based biotech startup SCellex, pitched by the company founder, CEO Päivi Saavalainen. As the first prize, the company was granted €5,000 to continue the development of their solution.
SCellex is developing a novel spatial transcriptomics method based on visual barcoding with feature barcode beads, as well as a picowell chip array platform to study the gene expression profiles of cells directly from tissue sections or single cells in high throughput manner. This has impact on biomedical research and also future diagnostic use, as it helps to discover the locations, roles and interactions of different cell types both in healthy tissues and diseases, and to explore their key marker genes as potential drug targets. Päivi Saavalainen founded the company in 2018.
“I run the Immunomics research lab at the University of Helsinki and Folkhälsan Research Center, and one of the focus areas of my group has been single-cell RNA sequencing methods. Back in 2016, I invented a novel way to barcode single cells for high-throughput sequencing. At that stage, it was just an idea with no data nor funding, so the University and Helsinki Innovation Services (the tech transfer office of University of Helsinki) decided to leave the IPR to me,” she recalls the first steps of SCellex.
“In 2018, I joined the SPARK Finland program, as I saw that the spatial analysis of cells and tissues was about to become a hot topic. SPARK Finland provided me with a lot of support and feedback from experts, broadened my network and put me in touch with great mentors that believed in my idea and encouraged me to take the next steps, so in September of that same year I founded SCellex.”
The first grant came from Runar Bäckström Foundation in early 2019. The initial team and the board members also decided to invest in the company, and the first angel investor got on board during the same year. Instrumentarium Science Foundation supported SCellex with a larger grant of €50,000, and the company’s angel investor decided to make a second investment and also join the board.
“This was enough to get Business Finland involved, now supporting us with an R&D loan of over half a million euros,” Saavalainen says.
SCellex is growing, counting now eight team members and four additional board members.
“Currently, we are also part of the Health Incubator Helsinki program, which provides us with the office space on the third floor of Terkko Health Hub. Sharing a space with other companies is very important to foster peer-learning. The incubator offers additional training and opportunities to meet venture capitalists to discover more funding opportunities,” Saavalainen says.
2023 marks an exciting year for SCellex:
“We plan to go to market with our first MVP during early 2023, so a lot of focus in the company will move from pure R&D to also include productisation and marketing. We will also actively seek for a new CEO to lead the business development of the company, so I can focus more on being CTO,” Saavalainen says.
How was the Y Science experience: the pitching competition finals and preparations, and the event itself?
“I really enjoyed taking part in Y Science, and not only because I was a finalist in the Health Pitching Competition. Compared to the Slush main event which is industry-agnostic, Y Science helped us find the right type of connections and even potential new customers among the researchers who attended the event. Having a booth in the networking area of the event also brought us great visibility, so people could easily find us after we pitched on stage. The pitch coaching offered as part of the competition was also very valuable, providing us with feedback on different aspects of our project as well as on how to improve our pitch.”
Y Science is organised by HiLife from the University of Helsinki. In 2021 and 2022, Health Capital Helsinki has co-orgasied the Health & Pharma track and the Health Pitching Competition aimed at early-stage startups and pre-startups. Päivi Saavalainen was interviewed by Chiara Facciotto for HiLife.
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