Innosphere 2026 Life Sciences Participant Laura White Named to Activate Fellowship's 2026 Anywhere Cohort

Innosphere 2026 Life Sciences Participant Laura White Named to Activate Fellowship's 2026 Anywhere Cohort

AURORA,Colo., July 14, 2026. Every drug, enzyme, and biomaterial made from living cellsdepends on one thing: the cell's ability to build proteins correctly. AI hasmade designing new proteins fast and cheap, but making them is still the hardpart. A cell either manufactures a designed protein well or it doesn’t, andtoday the only way to find out is through slow, blind trial and error at thebench. That gap between easy design and difficult manufacturing is whereprotein programs stall.

AndonBio has built the first technology to read what happens inside cells as theybuild proteins. As a cell assembles a protein, Andon directly measures thesupply of raw materials feeding its protein-building machinery, and how heavilyeach protein draws that supply down. That lets teams spot bottlenecks at thedesign stage, before committing weeks at the bench to a protein the cell can’tefficiently make.

Thatwork has earned Andon Bio co-founder and CEO Laura White a place in the 2026cohort of the Activate Fellowship, a competitive national program that fundsscientists and engineers building hard-tech companies. White joins ActivateAnywhere, the fellowship's cohort for founders building outside the program’shub cities.

Here’show it works. As a cell builds a protein, it draws on a supply of amino acids,delivered by molecules called transfer RNAs. Andon’s platform measures which ofthose supplies run short as production ramps up. Because every protein draws onthe supply differently, each leaves a distinct signature. These signaturesbecome training data: the more proteins Andon measures, the better its modelspredict how a new protein will express before anyone builds it.

Whitefocused on tRNA biology during her Ph.D. with Jay Hesselberth at the Universityof Colorado School of Medicine. The nanopore method behind Andon’s platformcame out of a collaboration with Aleksandar Radakovic, then a Ph.D. student inJack Szostak’s lab, who developed the chemistry for capturing tRNAs that areactively carrying an amino acid, ready to add it to a growing protein.Together, they built a way to directly measure how much of that ready-to-usesupply a cell has as it builds a protein.

“OnceI could directly measure the molecules that feed protein production, it becameclear those measurements could crack why protein expression is sounpredictable,” said White. “Andon Bio is the bet that they can.”

TheActivate Fellowship provides founders a living stipend, research funding, and acommunity of peers and mentors over two years, giving them room to de-riskearly-stage technology. The program began as Cyclotron Road at LawrenceBerkeley National Laboratory and is now the independent nonprofit Activate.

AndonBio joins a cohort of 50 scientist-entrepreneurs building 41 companies, alldeveloping transformative technology for the world’s most urgent challenges.The cohort spans Activate's hub communities in Berkeley, Boston, Houston, andNew York, along with Activate Anywhere.

AboutAndon Bio

AndonBio is on a mission to make producing proteins as easy as designing them. Itsplatform directly measures the cell's supply of tRNAs, the molecules thatdeliver amino acids to build proteins, revealing a signature specific to eachprotein made. As Andon measures more of these signatures, its models learn therules that govern protein production. Learn more at andon.bio.

Aboutthe Activate Fellowship

Activateis a nonprofit organization that funds scientists and engineers to bring theirresearch out of the lab and into the world. Since its founding as CyclotronRoad at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Activate has supported hundredsof hard-tech founders working across energy, agriculture, infrastructure,health, and materials. Learn more at activate.org.

MediaContact

Laura White

Co-founder & CEO, Andon Bio

laura@andon.bio

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