Meta-Flux has been named Drive Startup of the Year by MassBio, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council and one of the longest-standing life-sciences industry organisations in the United States. The award was presented on 26 March 2026 at MassBio's State of Possible Conference in Boston, and accepted by co-founder and chief executive Lee Sherlock.
Drive is the accelerator MassBio runs with SCbio for early-stage biotech and techbio companies; Meta-Flux joined its Fall 2025 cohort. We are a small team working out of Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, and recognition of this kind from a community as established as MassBio matters to us. It reflects less any single moment than the direction of the work, and the therapeutics partners who have been willing to build alongside us.
What the award recognises
The award points to a conviction that has shaped Meta-Flux from the outset: that drug discovery is held back less by a shortage of data than by a shortage of mechanism. Predictions that cannot be traced to a biological cause are hard to trust and harder to act on. Our response is to build the intelligence layer to simulate disease, constructing mechanistic, in silico models of disease biology from patient tissue and multi-omic data, so that every prediction resolves back to a real process in the underlying systems biology rather than to a statistical association.
The Drive programme assesses companies across the early-stage life-sciences ecosystem, and being singled out as Startup of the Year suggests this mechanistic framing is beginning to resonate beyond our own team. We read it as reason to hold the standard high, not as a verdict that the work is finished.
The work behind it
The platform is built for disease-scale simulation. By grounding models in patient tissue and multi-omic data, we can run perturbations in silico and study how a system responds, work that supports target selection, pathway prioritisation, patient stratification, and biomarker strategy. Because the models are mechanistic, they can characterise not only whether a therapeutic is likely to work but why, including the determinants of sensitivity and resistance that so often decide a programme's fate.
None of this is theoretical for us. The award reflects early traction with therapeutics partners applying these simulations to live discovery questions, and it is that collaboration, more than any benchmark, that tells us whether the approach is earning its place in real decisions.
Looking ahead
We are grateful to MassBio and the Drive programme, and to the partners and collaborators whose work is inseparable from our own. An award marks a point on a longer road; the task now is to deepen the models, broaden the diseases we can simulate, and continue to earn the trust of the teams who rely on our predictions.
“One of the hardest problems in drug development isn't chemistry, it's understanding biology well enough to make the right decisions early.”
Lee Sherlock, co-founder and CEO, Meta-Flux