The Westchester County Biosciences Accelerator (WCBA), developed by the county’s Office of Economic Development, has announced that another dozen business ventures have been invited to participate in the program. The latest cohort of participants is the accelerator’s third since its 2019 inception.
“As we move into the third year of the accelerator program, we are thrilled to welcome high-impact innovations, growing support from community mentors and increased engagement by the Westchester bioscience community,” said Mary Howard, WCBA program director.
The program runs six months and provides coaching and mentoring to the participants, along with entrepreneurship education and guidance from an experienced entrepreneur coach. A goal is for the business ventures to have developed developed fundable business plans by May.
The participants include:
- Charles Mobbs of Mount Sinai, whose health care startup Gilga-Med has developed a high-throughput drug discovery platform, leading to treatments for strokes and age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases;
- Charles Silvestro of PNI Therapeutics, who is working on a mind-body intervention for cancer patients to supplement traditional treatments
- Claudia Polgar of Columbia University, whose digital health startup and mobile health productivity app CheckPoint Health helps family caregivers to manage and organize their loved one’s at-home care;
- Etizaz Shah and Amit Bhardwaj of Columbia University, who are developing a digital health platform, EZ Health, to connect patients to doctors who speak their native language;
- James Scholtz and William Snyder, independent participants developing an optical infrared camera;
- Jay Schiff and Stanislav Roslyakov, independent participants developing a patented medication dispensing system called Addinex, which is intended to help prevent medication misuse, overuse and addiction;
- Lili Deligianni, Tyler Kulcsar and Maria Lopez of Columbia University, developing an alcohol abuse remission and relapse-prevention digital platform, Sense4me;
- Matt Mandel, an independent participant whose Renegade Therapeutics seeks to develop technological tools to understand and define multiple sclerosis, the use that knowledge to develop disease-modifying drugs;
- Maya Ber Lerner of New York University, whose startup Chiefy seeks to create a platform to promote to zero waste and zero harm in surgery;
- Natasha Shtraizent, Lina Freage and Efrat Eliyahu of Mount Sinai, working on a therapeutic treatment for advanced-stage head and neck squamous cell carcinoma
- Rafael Gras Pena of Columbia, whose team is building more efficient and cost-effective stem cell research technology;
- Roman Fleysher of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who is creating an image processing service for MRI data to be uploaded by customers.
“Biosciences is a key industry in the county”™s business ecosystem, and we are proud to once again identify and support emerging ventures in this exciting space,” said County Executive George Latimer. “We are dedicated to continuing to grow this important community, which has a tremendous impact on our economy.”
