Mayo Clinic Platform > Fast-Tracking Cures

Fast-Tracking Cures

Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate is transforming startups in 30 weeks

By Kathleen Hull Illustrations by Ben Fearnley

It started with a bold question: What happens when you put the largest collection of biomedical data ever assembled — a tranche of 32 million de-identified patient records — in the hands of the brightest, most driven entrepreneurs and data scientists in the healthcare industry? The answer is taking shape thanks to an innovative program called Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate. Launched in 2022, Accelerate has already put more than 40 healthcare technology startups on the road to success.

Three times per year, a group of hand-selected startups enter the 30-week program. Participants are given access to the deep, high-quality data available through Mayo Clinic Platform. With data access, they can build and test their algorithms and begin to integrate them into real-world healthcare settings. The Accelerate team also assembles a group of expert advisors for each startup and pairs each company with a Mayo Clinic mentor — typically a clinician in the branch of medicine the company focuses on. Through research and collaboration, startups gain firsthand insights into how their products will work in the clinical space.

We want to work with startups because we speak their language. We can really focus in on them and help them access the resources we have. We’re empowering them to bring their products to clinicians and patients.
— Jamie Sundsbak, senior manager of Accelerate

Graduates of Accelerate are already transforming the healthcare world, raising around $145 million as of February 2025 in the drive to bring their products to market. And most importantly, they are producing impactful new solutions for patients everywhere.

One company, C the Signs, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan a patient's electronic health record and predict cancer risk with a high degree of accuracy. Another, Delfina, created a pregnancy support app that has been downloaded by thousands of patients. A third, Luminare, created a screening system to improve the treatment of patients with sepsis in hospitals that was launched with considerable success at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. After using Mayo Clinic’s data to refine their platform, Luminare is aiming to bring its lifesaving product to more hospitals.

‘Foot on the Gas’

The first five weeks of Accelerate are dedicated to onboarding. During this time, “the Accelerate team starts to build a relationship with each and every individual participating in the program,” explains Jamie Sundsbak, the senior manager of Accelerate. “We want to get to know them. We want to understand what keeps them up at night and what they are hoping to accomplish.” Companies participate in Accelerate virtually, which provides valuable flexibility. Notably, nearly half of the companies that have participated so far are international.

“By week six, we want these companies to have a game plan,” Sundsbak says. “That’s when we give them access to our cloud. So leading up to that, we help them set goals. We work with them and their technical teams to kind of pre-navigate the data, and we have a comprehensive discussion about data safety and the ethics of data use. Then, the next 20 weeks is just foot on the gas.”

What does this next period look like for a young company’s leaders? For Bea Bakshi, M.D., the CEO of C the Signs, it meant digging into Mayo Clinic’s data to retrospectively test her company’s models.

“We actually had the opportunity to see if we could intercept cancers earlier than the time and date of the diagnosis by physicians at Mayo,” she explains. Her team examined data related to the five types of cancer with the highest mortality rates in the U.S. — breast, colorectal, lung, prostate and pancreatic cancer — and found that their model was effective in detecting cancer up to five years earlier in 26% of patients.

“That was phenomenal for us, and a really exciting research opportunity that we’re planning to publish,” Dr. Bakshi says.

Eureka Moments

Each company in Accelerate has the opportunity to work with Mayo Clinic’s rich data in the way that best suits their needs, just as C the Signs did.

For example, Luminare CEO Sarma Velamuri, M.D., and his team were able to begin identifying core phenotypes that make a patient more likely to develop sepsis during a hospital stay. “This was a eureka moment that happened when we were looking at the data,” Dr. Velamuri explains. “This pattern emerged, and we realized that there were common denominators to patients with sepsis. It was the first time in five years of working on sepsis full-time that I had this big ‘aha’ moment.”

Meanwhile, Delfina CEO Senan Ebrahim, M.D., Ph.D., and his team approached the data with an exploratory mindset as they considered how they could more effectively scan patients for pregnancy risks. “This data on tens of thousands of patients was more representative of the full spectrum of risk than anything we’ve seen previously,” Dr. Ebrahim says. Delfina already had high-performing predictive models for identifying patients who would benefit from care plans that prevent hypertension and gestational diabetes. With access to Mayo’s data, they were able to build models for predicting a patient’s risk of excessive gestational weight gain as well.

Keeping Up the Pace

After the 30 weeks are up and a company has “graduated” from Accelerate, its relationship with Mayo Clinic often continues. Some companies collaborate with Mayo teams to launch pilots or clinical trials, while others participate in Platform’s Solutions Studio, which helps them develop and validate their solutions and deploy them into workflows. Many of them also retain close ties with their cohort members and clinical mentors. The yearly Graduation Showcase event hosted by the Accelerate team gives companies the opportunity to present their product to Mayo Clinic at large, as well as to potential customers from Mayo Clinic Care Network and other institutions. This means that the work — and networking — doesn’t end after graduation.

“We want to work with startups because we speak their language,” Sundsbak says. “We can really focus in on them and help them access the resources we have. We’re empowering them to bring their products to clinicians and patients. We want them to leave the program feeling like it was the best possible thing they could have ever done.”

With the program attracting dynamic new cohorts multiple times each year, there are infinite opportunities for the Accelerate team to keep empowering young companies. No one is taking their foot off the gas anytime soon.