Musy Award goes to two EPFL Female Entrepreneurs

The first winner is Clara Moldovan, CEO and founder of Lausanne based Swistor. Battery life has become a significant selection criterion when purchasing a mobile device; however, the slow charging systems and shorter lifespan of the batteries affect the user experience. To address these challenges, the Swistor project aims to build an energy storage device that charges in two minutes, with an extended lifetime that is 30 times longer than current batteries, using materials that are safer and environmentally friendly than traditional lithium and cobalt. Target customers are the main mobile phone providers and the emerging market of self-powered IoT devices. The company expects more than 20 billion of such connected devices by 2025.

The second winner is Margaux Duchamp, co-founder and future CEO of ArcoScreen. The Vaud based Swiss medtech is developing a new microfluidic discovery platform for drug screening targeting cell membrane receptors. G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) represent 35% of all approved modern drug targets and are a major part of the 200 US most profitable drugs. These proteins are the most successful drug targets to treat diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Current drug screening assays targeting GPCRs are time consuming and require high investments in liquid handling robots. Current methods need four successive assays to decipher the drug’s mode of action; each one lasts several hours, potentially generates radioactive waste and prevents the use of patient cells (replaced by approximate model cells), thus leading to more challenging clinical trials approval, and impacting the time-to-market of new drugs. ArcoScreen’s solution, SynScreen revolutionizes GPCR screening by drastically reducing the assay time from hours to minutes by combining 4 tests in a unique and simple assay.

Additional information can be found in an article on the EPFL website.

Five female entrepreneurs supported already

Launched six years ago, The Isabelle Musy award is designed to award and support female entrepreneurs in the Swiss Romande and Swiss Italian regions. The aim is to encourage the creation of technology companies by women. Previous editions were won by Veronica Ponce de Leon in 2014, Sandra Sulser in 2016, and Agnès Petit in 2018. The latter is the Founder and CEO of Fribourg based 3D Concrete printing startup Mobbot.

(ES)

Picture from left to right: Clara Moldovan, Margaux Duchamp
Photo by Alain Herzog, EPFL