Inflatable body suit and RNA platform among the hopeful seeking support from NUS innovation programme
The programme run by NUS enterprise has seen 418 participants and helped to create 149 start-ups that had gone on to raise over S$40 million in external investments collectively.
Associate Professor Benjamin Tee, the associate vice-president of NUS Enterprise giving his opening address. Image source: NUS Enterprise.
An inflatable exoskeleton patented fabric-based air-spring technology, to assist manual handling activities in the logistics and healthcare segments from a local startup ArmasTec, was one of the products on show during The NUS Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP) which is one of NUS Enterprise’s flagship innovation programmes.
Currently in its 9th run, 14 NUS teams presented their solutions at Lift-Off Day to an audience comprising industry, venture capitalists and incubators in a bid to secure funding as well as partnership and collaboration opportunities as they moved from research projects into becoming startups.
Rainier Natividad, co-founder of ArmasTec, demonstrating their AireLevate base suit.
According to Rainier Natividad, co-founder of ArmasTec, their AireLevate base suit can reduce the amount of effort the lower back must do to lift objects by up to 55%. He said:
The suit does require to be reinflated every 4 hours. However, this coincides well with the industrial working environment. At the start of the day, you inflate it. 4 hours later, it needs a top-up but it's lunchtime anyway. After lunch, you inflate it again. After 4 hours, it's the end of the shift and it's time to go home.
He also shared that the suit is currently undergoing trials at a multinational logistics company and an iconic hotel in Singapore. Natividad added that the suit was also about to start undergoing trials in its second industry vertical, healthcare, where nurses would be wearing it as they moved patients about.
Associate Professor Benjamin Tee, the associate vice-president of NUS Enterprise, said during his opening speech that Grip has seen 418 participants and helped to create 149 start-ups, that had gone on to raise over S$40 million in external investments collectively. ArmasTec has itself secured about S$700,000 in funding.
Joseph Foley, CSO and co-founder at Picopoint Genomics. Image source: NUS Enterprise.
Another hopeful startup, Picopoint Genomics, uses its proprietary RNA sequencing platform – Picoception, to help doctors predict a patient’s clinical outcome and treatment response from a tissue sample, thus enabling precision medicine. Using RNA as a clinical tool to predict outcomes and match patients to the best therapies helps reduce the possibility of treatment failure.
Joseph Foley, CSO and co-founder at Picopoint Genomics, said:
Unlike DNA sequencing which requires HPC levels of compute power, our platform focuses only on the essential RNA signals from the patient’s biopsy. This allows the RNA sequences obtained to be processed quickly as we are focusing only on the most essential information. One advantage of targeting RNA instead of DNA is that we can work with much smaller data than the whole genome: active genes are less than 1% of the human genome. So, our data analysis can be done on a high-powered desktop computer.
According to Foley, RNA allows us to go beyond the traditional scope of DNA mutations for genetic disease or cancer, to cover a far wider spectrum of disease, and the company’s technology also works on the smallest clinical biopsies. That means conditions that were previously inaccessible for RNA profiling due to limited material (such as from small organs like the eye or nose, or needle-core biopsies) can now be profiled.
The importance of GRIP
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When asked about the importance of a programme like GRIP had for startups, Foley said that GRIP provided them with an important market perspective and the essentials needed for business growth. “We knew we had an excellent platform that can be applied for patient care but needed a strategy to bring it to market. The practical training and guidance from an experienced team of entrepreneurs was tremendously important to start us off on this journey,” he said.
Natividad explained that designing and making a product is only half the battle, you still needed to build a business around it. “GRIP has been excellent in showing us how to build a tech business,” Natividad added, “It really did jump-start our commercialisation efforts and definitely helped in accelerating the development of the AireLevate.”
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