HEALTHTECH
Up to the test Founded in June, biotech firm Salient Bio has hit the ground running with what it believes to be the fastest-ever mass scale Covid-19 diagnostics platform, as HealthInvestor UK reports
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his year’s global health crisis has had an immense impact on the world economy. Of course, many businesses have suffered, some have had to shut down completely, yet some have shown resilience and were able to adapt and grow, particularly tech companies. Despite this, you might not think of 2020 as the best year to launch a start-up. Nevertheless, Salient Bio did just that. Founded in June by previous members of Imperial College London’s Biofoundry unit, biotech firm Salient Bio has hit the ground running with what it believes to be the ‘fastestever’ mass scale Covid-19 diagnostics platform, utilising top-of-the-line robotics to facilitate the development of what the co-founders have coined the ‘Lab of the 21st Century’.
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An unlikely birth For a year and half, experts in robotics and microbiology, Marta Ciechońska and Miles Priestman, worked at a specialist unit at Imperial College London called the London Biofoundry which focuses on the commercialisation of synthetic biology and experimental biological processes. In January this year, the Biofoundry offered to help an affiliated Chinese university as the coronavirus epidemic began to peak in China. The Biofoundry team had the insight that one of the largest issues facing centralised, automated, mass-scale diagnostics was the resilience of the supply chain. The Chinese university asked the Biofoundry team to use its expertise to design a supply chain agnostic workflow, which
HealthInvestor UK • December 2020
