GenoGra is among the four winning projects of the 2022 edition of Startcup Lombardia, the competition promoted by Regione Lombardia to foster research and technological innovation and encourage the birth and development of new companies with high business potential. The project, winner in the Life Science & MedTech category, was awarded a prize of 25,000 euros.

GenoGra - ideated by Guido Walter Di Donato, PhD candidate in Information Technology, in collaboration with Guglielmo Bruno and Mirko Coggi, Biomedical Engineering students at the Politecnico di Milano, and the PhD candidate in Information Technology Alberto Zeni, with the scientific advisory of Prof. Marco Santambrogio (Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering) - aims to build a next-generation computing platform for genome analysis, able to fully leverage the potential of genomic data obtained through Next Generation Sequencing technologies.

GenoGra's platform offers end-to-end solutions for genome analysis for both diagnostic and research purposes, providing access to simple yet powerful analysis tools while masking the complexity of underlying hardware acceleration to end users. GenoGra's technology leverages an innovative nonlinear representation of DNA based on genome graphs, which are "networks" of genomic data containing information about different individuals. Such a representation makes it possible to faithfully capture the biological reality of DNA, ensuring a quality of analysis that is far superior to that achievable through tools based on "classical" genomic sequences.

Thanks to the team's multidisciplinary expertise, straddling bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, and computer engineering, GenoGra's platform exceeds currently available solutions both in terms of scalability and ease of use, thus enabling new applications on a previously unexplored scale.

The 25,000 euro prize will be used to further develop the platform and to carry out studies aimed at validating GenoGra's technology in industrially relevant environments. This validation is, in fact, a fundamental step towards the realization of GenoGra's vision: democratizing genomic analysis to contribute to the realization of a future in which humanity will have a total understanding of how DNA works.