Guido Walter Di Donato

Genomic (DNA) analysis has earned a crucial role in tomorrow's science and medicine. Today, however, we still fail to tap the true potential of this technology. This is mainly due to the fact that the currently available software tools for genomic analysis are poorly scalable and absolutely not user-friendly. This causes analysis processes to be fragmented, inefficient, redundant, and prone to human error. GenoGra has developed an innovative representation of genomic data based on graphs: interconnected networks of genetic information that provide unprecedented quality and scalability of the analysis. Such data encoding also allows us to standardize most of the modern analysis processes, reducing the complexity and number of software tools needed. On the other hand, processing genomic graphs in a performant way is a great computational challenge. GenoGra's team of computer and biomedical engineers has years of experience in accelerating algorithms for genomics and graph analytics. Our development approach allows us to exploit the advantages of genomic graphs and - at the same time - leverage commodity hardware (GPUs) to achieve a runtime performance that is competitive with the best-performing tools on the market. All of this is done completely transparently with respect to the end user, who can take advantage of the benefits of using hardware accelerators without having any special skills or knowledge of the underlying architectures. GenoGra's founders are four researchers and one professor, all from Milano's Politecnico. The founders are authors of an Italian patent application (later extended to PCT), which covers the core technology behind GenoGra's proposed tools: a "search engine" capable of efficiently finding sequences of interest within genomic graphs, exploiting heterogeneous computational architectures. After more than 4 years of R&D, GenoGra's technology is currently at TRL5: the prototype of our platform has been validated in a pilot study with geneticists, demonstrating the usability of our tools in a relevant scenario. To date, the bootstrapping of GenoGra has occurred thanks to more than €150,000 of research funds deployed in research and development of the technology and €55,000 raised in the form of grants, all without dilution. In the past two years, GenoGra has gained considerable success in the Italian startup scene, winning Switch2Product 2021 and StartCup Lombardia 2022, and being one of the six best startups at GoBeyond 2023 by Sisal.