COST Innovators Grant IG20117

How quickly a year goes by. As a one-year follow-up to the COST Action Mye-InfoBank, we received funding for a COST Innovators Grant (IG20117). The project Omnicellscope allowed us to pursue a concrete idea for building a start-up that emerged from the consortium members’ research on deconvoluting bulk RNA-seq data into cell-type fractions using single-cell RNA-seq data as a reference. We saw considerable potential in this technology, from research to clinical diagnostics. During the last twelve months, a selected team of immunologists and bioinformaticians stemming from the COST Action Mye-InfoBank met regularly with business consultants to develop a solid business plan for this concept, with Dr. Alexander Dietrich, a former doctoral researcher specializing in the topic, as the driving force behind the effort. With most of the team coming exclusively from academia, there were a lot of opportunities to expand our knowledge and understanding of market-focused product development. We are grateful to COST Association - European Cooperation in Science and Technology for their support in this endeavour, which culminated in a final meeting of the CIG core team in Barcelona where we hosted a Deconvolution Forum. This event brought us together with experts and potential customers from academia and industry, and the resulting consultations helped us to consolidate many of the thoughts and ideas we had developed. With the end of this CIG, we look forward to refining our strategy, now with a much better sense of how to navigate the start-up world.