Amanda Cashin

Biography
Amanda Cashin is Co-Founder and Head of Illumina Accelerator, a leading company creation engine and investment vehicle focused on building genomics-driven startups. Founded in Fall 2014 in San Francisco and expanded to Cambridge, UK in Summer 2020, Illumina Accelerator has invested in 74 startups advancing breakthrough applications in genomics, including applications in therapeutics, women’s health, cancer diagnostics, consumer nutrition, agriculture, synthetic biology, and skin microbiome. Previously, Amanda was Senior Vice President of Alexandria Venture Investments at Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. Amanda also led a team of life science professionals with strong science and business expertise responsible for industry research, company analysis, business development, and thought leadership activities to help position Alexandria at the forefront of the industry. She earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from the California Institute of Technology. Her scientific expertise and peer-reviewed publications are in the fields of biochemistry, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, pharmacology, electrophysiology, and neuroscience.

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Talk

Illumina Accelerator Showcase:
Illumina Accelerator
Illumina Accelerator is a company creation engine co-located with Illumina research and development sites in San Francisco Bay Area and Cambridge, UK.

Illumina Accelerator - Creating Breakthrough Omics Startups
Illumina Accelerator Showcase featuring diverse breakthrough genomics startup presentations.

Candler Paige

Biography
Candler Paige has extensive experience in the chronic pain field where she has spent her career researching novel therapeutic targets for precise patient populations. Following her doctoral degree, Candler co-founded Doloromics where they have built a platform to identify novel targets and therapeutics using a human-first approach.

Illumina Accelerator Showcase:
DOLOROMICS
Doloromics has developed a proprietary platform, DOLOReS, to identify novel targets and therapeutics for chronic pain.

Precision Therapeutics for the Treatment of Chronic Pain
We'll cover how Doloromics developed proprietary algorithm to identify novel targets and therapeutics for chronic pain

Tara deBoer

Biography
Tara is a trained bioinorganic chemist with 15+ years of experience developing chemistry-powered solutions to address unmet needs in biology and medicine. Tara is one of the founders of BioAmp Diagnostics, a startup company focused on commercializing innovative surveillance tools and diagnostic tests designed to support appropriate and judicious use of antibiotics. The underlying technology that powers BioAmp’s products was conceived through a highly collaborative consortium on the University of California, Berkeley campus that brought together public health specialist, medical doctors, chemists, engineers, and microbiologists. As one of the inventors of the core technology that powers the diagnostic and surveillance tools BioAmp is developing, Tara led the early research and development activities at BioAmp and now leading efforts to translate their first stringently validated research assay into a first in class diagnostic test solution to inform care of one of the most common infections around the world – urinary tract infections

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Illumina Accelerator Showcase:
BioAmp Diagnostics
BioAmp is a precision diagnostics company leveraging genomics and chemistry to develop unique diagnostic and surveillance tools to guide treatment of infectious diseases in clinic, at home, and around the world

Evolving Clinical Microbiology Beyond Growth-Based Diagnostics
Delivering diagnostic tests powered by chemistry that is shaped through the genomic fingerprints of pathogenic bacteria

Michael Becich

Biography
Michael Becich serves as Chief Executive Officer of Cache DNA. With a background in Bioengineering and Mathematical & Computational Sciences from Stanford University, he has served in various roles across the industry: Lead Data Scientist at Octave Bioscience, Bioinformatics at Illumina, and Synthetic Biology at NASA. He is passionate about decoding multiomic complexity and translating tools from research to the clinic more accessibly. While at Harvard Business School (MS/MBA Biotechnology: Life Sciences), he met James Banal, a postdoc from MIT and joined forces to build Cache DNA.

Illumina Accelerator Showcase:
Cache DNA

Rebuilding the Backbone of Precision Medicine: Next Generation Biobanking