PhD candidates win startup ideas contest in bid to accelerate clinical drug trials

Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology PhD candidates Mr Denzil Furtado and Ms Paula Cevaal and Research Fellow Dr Matthew Faria have been named winners of Blackbird Ventures’ inaugural startup ideas competition, Wild Futures.

Wild Futures is designed to encourage global, world-changing ambitions: to “see the best minds of this generation create the brightest, wildest future for the next”.

Mr Furtado, Ms Cevaal and Dr Faria participated in the competitive eight-week program aimed at supporting technical founders in 'deep-tech' industries to build and shape their startup ideas into something tangible and achievable.

The team aspire to build a biotech startup, Gerulus, that would accelerate the process of clinical drug trials and cut down on failure rates to reach prospective patients who could benefit from new medications sooner than is currently possible.

Their aim is to predict how the next generation of medicine will function in the body without needing to wait for animal or human trials. To do this, they’re integrating deep biological knowledge with top-tier mathematical modelling to extrapolate organ and tissue level behaviour from more simple, automatable cell-drug interaction data.

The team were paired with experienced mentor Dr Deborah Pascoe, Head of Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) at Vaxxas, throughout the competition.