We are excited to announce that Lemna Bio, a standout company from the DayOne Accelerator 2025 cohort, is the first startup selected to join DayOne NEXT, our long-term support program for the most promising DayOne founders. 

DayOne NEXT reflects a simple belief: the journey doesn’t end with the accelerator – it’s just the beginning. Designed as a hands-on, long-term venture builder, the program supports a small number of exceptional startups as they build, scale and anchor their R&D in the Basel Area. Participants receive a non-dilutive CHF 50,000 grant, up to 12 months of tailored operational and strategic support (valued at up to CHF 50,000), workspace at the Switzerland Innovation Park Basel Area, and deep integration into the region’s world-leading life sciences ecosystem.  

By working side-by-side with founders, DayOne NEXT provides not just resources, but sustained, highly personalized support – from fractional expertise and mentorship to ecosystem access and visibility opportunities – helping startups transition from early traction to long-term impact.  

Lemna Bio is a techbio company building a structural AI platform to decode and validate hard intracellular targets. While advances in chemistry are unlocking new ways to engage biological targets, failures in drug discovery are still largely driven by incorrect target selection or an incomplete understanding of how to engage them in a disease context. Lemna Bio develops the tools, intelligence and experimental data to help drug discovery teams de-risk target biology and disease mechanisms early – before committing to costly chemistry efforts. 

Commenting on the milestone, Moustafa Houmani, Co-founder & CEO of Lemna Bio, said, “DayOne provided us with rare, first-hand insights into how pharmaceutical companies operate – insights that typically take years to acquire. Being selected for DayOne NEXT is an exciting opportunity to continue building with the right support and ecosystem around us.”  

With Lemna Bio as the first company in DayOne NEXT, we are proud to deepen our commitment to the most promising founders in our community and to support them as they scale breakthrough innovations at the intersection of technology and pharma R&D. 

The journey doesn’t end with the accelerator – in many ways, it’s just the beginning. 

We are proud to announce the launch of DayOne NEXT, a long-term support program designed to help the most promising startups from the DayOne accelerator cohort build, scale and anchor their R&D in the Basel Area. It is a hands-on, non-profit venture builder for exceptional early-stage teams, where we provide capital (no equity, no fees), workspace and deeply embedded operational support – and we stay for the long term. 

Each year, up to three startups from the accelerator cohort will be selected to join DayOne NEXT and receive tailored, long-term backing to transform breakthrough science and technology into real-world impact. 

DayOne NEXT is designed around a simple idea: early-stage healthtech, techbio and pharma-enabling ventures need more than short-term momentum. They need time, focus, ecosystem integration and highly tailored support. We will work side-by-side with a small number of exceptional founders and actively help build the company.

What this means in practice…

For the startups we back, this isn’t just “access to benefits.” It’s real involvement. We embed ourselves within the team – working on strategy, fundraising, hiring, positioning and whatever is mission-critical. 

The program is intentionally selective. We select top ventures from the DayOne accelerator program with strong scientific foundations and a robust intellectual property position – or a clear path to defensibility. Companies should have an active R&D component, require technical, regulatory or clinical support beyond business development, and have raised limited external funding so that the grant delivers meaningful impact.

We also prioritize engaged, collaborative teams with a clear strategic rationale for locating R&D in the Basel Area and strong alignment with the region’s ecosystem.  

We deliberately work with very few startups so we can go deep. This is high-conviction, long-term venture building. 

DayOne NEXT represents a new chapter in our mission: not just to accelerate innovation, but to anchor it, nurture it and help it scale sustainably within the Basel ecosystem.

It is more than just follow-on funding. It is a long-term partnership – aligning capital, expertise and ecosystem access to help exceptional founders build enduring, globally impactful health innovation. 

Learn more about the DayOne accelerator program here.  

A few years ago, “doing omics” often meant generating a single layer of insight and handing it off downstream. The conversation made clear that pharma has moved on: multi-omics now matters most when it connects to validation and development decisions, not when it produces isolated signals.

The implication for innovators is straightforward: the value proposition is increasingly platform oriented. The winning solutions reduce uncertainty at a specific decision point (or across several), and they come with a realistic path to operationalization inside a drug development organization.

The panel converged on a pragmatic definition of value: multi-omics earns its keep where it is already close to routine use and improves decisions across the chain.

Three “value zones” surfaced clearly:

Target identification and prioritization, with a validation plan attached

Integrated datasets – including preclinical, patient and real-world sources – help teams move beyond the “crowding problem” in oncology (too many efforts converging on the same small set of targets). But identifying more targets is not the win; the win is identifying targets that can be validated and developed with a credible downstream plan.

Molecule optimization using functional readouts

Modern biologics are increasingly complex, and teams need functional readouts to guide iteration. Omics-derived signals can provide that functional feedback loop, especially when combined with robust experimental workflows.

Clinical development and trial design

Longitudinal, multi-modal data collected in trials (not only bulk RNA sequencing) enables a more granular understanding of patient populations – supporting better trial design, patient stratification, and next-generation product criteria.

A recurring reality check is that multi-omics models can be scientifically impressive and still fail the “clinical feasibility” test. If your biomarker requires a long list of assays, modalities and feature-heavy models, clinicians may simply be unable (or unwilling) to use it in real-world trial design.

This is not anti-innovation – it is the translation bottleneck in plain terms. The path forward discussed on stage was not “less ambition,” but better constraint handling: interpretability, feature reduction that respects clinical logic, and smarter proxies for expensive measurements.

One concrete direction highlighted was predicting richer omics layers from more readily available clinical inputs (for example, extracting spatial or proteomic signals from standard pathology slides). Not “there yet,” but viewed as a strategically important route to speed and adoption.

If there was one word that kept resurfacing, it was validation.

In discovery, “ultimate validation” (a drug succeeding in the clinic) may be a decade away. In trials, validation may require embedding new measurements or endpoints into prospective designs, which introduces friction: incentives, timelines, regulatory comfort, and infrastructure maturity.

In clinical settings, the bar becomes existential: decision support impacts patient outcomes, and the expectation shifts toward rigorous evaluation (including trial-grade validation) rather than retrospective benchmarks.

For startups, the practical takeaway is to define validation in a staged way: what “good” looks like now, what must be true for adoption, and what prospective evidence is needed to earn expanded scope.

Even the best model fails if no one uses it. Trust, the panel argued, is not a slogan – it is built through usability, transparency, internal dogfooding, and human-in-the-loop workflows that reveal failure modes early.

One particularly sharp nuance: “explainability” is not the same as forcing AI to mimic human reasoning. If a model outputs a story that sounds reasonable but does not reflect how it produced the prediction, that can create false confidence rather than real trust.

The discussion treated partnering as a strategic reality – but also a survival question for innovators: can you maintain differentiation as methods and tooling evolve quickly?

A key point from the pharma side: technical models alone are not enough to differentiate long-term. The stronger partnering case often combines:

• unique data access (or ability to generate new data),
• operational speed and execution capability,
• and a clearly scoped measurable outcome tied to drug development decisions.

From the startup perspective, partnering can also be a rational risk allocation strategy for pharma teams facing a fast-moving methods landscape, where internal reinvention every six months is neither practical nor desirable.

If you are building a multi-omics, data science, or AI-enabled solution that can help pharma R&D make better decisions – from discovery through clinical development – DayOne is here to help you accelerate the path from promise to platform. 

Explore DayOne’s startup support (e.g. the DayOne Accelerator), sign up for our newsletter to be informed about our upcoming Open Mic sessions, or get in touch to discuss how we can support your journey from early validation to scaled partnerships. 

Please note: This article was based on discussion during the recent Open Mic: Next in Health event held on February 09, 2026, titled “Multi-omics intelligence: Platforms accelerating precision drug development”.

A recurring theme was that Basel compresses the essential ingredients of healthtech into a small geography. This density is one of the defining features of the Basel Area Life Sciences Supercluster: from pharma to clinical care to academia, the distance to collaboration is short.

As Astrid Kiermaier put it, “in the healthcare ecosystem … we have in a very close proximity every player around, and it’s easy to connect.” Bram Stieltjes described arriving in Basel and seeing “the hospital, two big pharma companies … all in such a small place.”

Basel also benefits from being a trinational region with natural connectivity across borders, which expands the partner and talent surface area beyond city limits.

The discussion emphasized that collaboration is not an ecosystem nice-to-have – it is a requirement driven by how modern pharma innovation works.

Astrid Kiermaier highlighted that clinical trials generate only a small slice of the data needed for a comprehensive patient picture. If you want to understand patients holistically, you must learn from the much larger share of patients who are not in trials and the data that sits outside trial datasets.

This is where the structure of the Basel Supercluster matters. Collaboration happens across pharma, hospitals, startups and the public sector because proximity makes it easier to align around shared problems, not only shared events.

Basel’s healthtech opportunity is tightly linked to a shift in what “infrastructure” means. Buildings and labs still matter, but the panel argued that data frameworks and standards will increasingly determine the speed at which innovation can move.

A practical example is University Hospital Basel’s move toward openEHR, an open standard that enables structured clinical data capture and reuse.

Bram Stieltjes framed this as ecosystem design, not just a technical upgrade: creating a foundation that supports a regional health data environment, not a single institution’s database. He stressed that “a hospital alone is not good enough. You need to have data on a regional basis.” He also highlighted why openness matters: if software providers sit in the middle, they can control data definitions and access, centralizing power and reducing collaboration. Open standards help avoid that dynamic.

Basel’s advantage is not only that stakeholders want to collaborate. It is that they are actively working to remove the operational friction that makes collaboration hard at scale.

One challenge discussed is the request cycle problem: repeated back and forth to find out whether relevant patient cohorts exist, how many there are, or whether a hypothesis is feasible. Bram Stieltjes described why this does not scale if every enquiry requires manual processing.

The direction described is to enable more self-service feasibility exploration, so users can explore parameters without exposing patient-level data. Astrid Kiermaier also pointed to privacy preserving approaches such as synthetic data as one way to reduce governance overhead and cut rounds of paperwork that slow collaboration.

A key forward-looking note from Astrid Kiermaier was that constraints on medical data use are likely to increase, making it even more important to invest in ways of working that enable innovation under tighter rules, rather than defaulting to slower contracting cycles.

The canton’s role was framed as enabling conditions: infrastructure, innovation promotion programs and legal frameworks that make collaboration easier and keep the region competitive.

Karin Sartorius described Basel-Stadt’s latest response to increased global competition: the creation of the Basel Incentive Programme, also referred to as the Basler-Standortpaket, with up to CHF 400m annual resources allocated to support spending for R&D and high-tech production in Basel-Stadt companies.

She also pointed to a specific gap many ecosystems struggle with: funding mechanisms that directly encourage collaboration between startups, hospitals, universities and industry. Basel is explicitly planning support in this direction effective from late 2026.

The audience Q&A sharpened the future agenda. A recurring question was whether Switzerland’s federal structure creates inevitable fragmentation for health data and research collaboration. The response was nuanced: federalism does not have to mean a fragmented data space if standards and intent are aligned.

Two constraints stood out. First is standardization and harmonization: the more clinical and research participation models can be standardized, the less organizations need to navigate “20 different” approaches. Second is willingness to share: progress depends on shared intent, clear benefits and mechanisms that make collaboration feel safe and worthwhile.

Beyond Switzerland, the panel also pointed to emerging requirements for understanding the full patient journey. Astrid Kiermaier noted that this often starts with registries and cohorts, with approaches like tokenization offering potential but facing regulatory and legislative hurdles in Europe.

Basel’s story is not that the region has “lots going on.” It is that the ecosystem has built a practical advantage by reducing the distance between discovery, clinical reality, industry capability and public sector enablement. For pharma innovation leaders, that density is valuable because it makes collaboration easier to initiate, easier to govern and more likely to translate into outcomes.

The panel’s most consistent message is that modern innovation depends on combining complementary capabilities and datasets. In practice, that means building partnership models that can connect clinical trial insights with real-world clinical data, while staying compliant and earning trust. Basel’s trajectory is also a reminder that infrastructure is increasingly defined by data standards and interoperable foundations. Open approaches like openEHR matter because they reduce lock-in, encourage reuse and make it more feasible to think beyond single-institution datasets.

Finally, the discussion highlighted that ecosystem competitiveness is not only a private sector concern. Policy tools such as the Basel innovation promotion programs and the Basel Incentive Programme, plus targeted support for collaboration, can create the conditions for faster experimentation, stronger partnerships and long-term resilience in the face of tightening constraints around medical data use.

Visit our Contact us page and tell us what you are trying to achieve via the form. Whether you are exploring innovation partnerships, looking for validation environments, or assessing where to build your next healthtech initiative, the DayOne team will follow up with relevant pathways and connections.

The 2025 edition of our DayOne Accelerator program culminated on 10-11 December at our sold-out Innovation Showcase event, held in Roche Building 1 in Basel. Over 300 startup founders, pharma industry leaders, investors and regional ecosystem stakeholders came together to watch two pitching competitions, learn from expert plenary presentations and panel discussions, and to network. 

After completing their 3-month program involving expert mentorship, webinars, hands-on “pitch to pharma” practice sessions, networking events, and more, 10 of this year’s cohort of 14 healthtech and techbio startups pitched on stage during the event. 

Nives Rombini, CEO & Co-founder, Navis Bio; Anna Cichońska, COO & Co-founder, Harmonic Discovery; Cécile Tardy-Srinivasan, Portfolio & Acceleration Lead, DayOne; Angela Holmes, CEO, OmniScience

A jury of investors and industry experts in digital health and pharma chose Harmonic Discovery as the competition winner, who got rewarded with a cash prize of CHF 16,200 representing the total ticket sales for the event. Navis Bio and OmniScience deservedly took the runner-up spots and were awarded startup packages for health.tech global summit (valued at CHF 3,500 each). The jury included representatives from Debiopharm, Redalpine, Kurma Partners, Vi Partners, Cathay Innovation, Asabys, Kadmos Capital, CSL Behring, Novartis, Novo Nordisk and Roche. 

Feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive, and the event also received some media coverage – notably in an article published in the Basler Zeitung (German). 

Thank you to Roche for hosting the event, and to Canton Basel-Stadt and our event partners for helping make this event happen! 

Before the dust has finished settling from the Showcase, the DayOne team is already preparing for key activities in the coming year. 

First up is the selection of those accelerator cohort members who will move to our long-term support program, DayOne Next, where they will receive a CHF 50k non-dilutive grant, 12 months of high-touch mentoring and in-kind services, plus office and lab space, and investment opportunities from our partners. 

Second is the startup pitching competition that DayOne will be running at the health.tech global summit, taking place in Basel on 3-5 March. 15 startup founders will have the chance to pitch directly to investors on the main conference stage. 

And of course, at the end of March we will be opening the Call for Applications for the 2026 edition of the DayOne Accelerator. Watch this space for details!