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Cambridge, Massachusetts-based life sciences venture capital company Flagship Pioneering ranked as the No. 5 most innovative company in North America on Fast Company’s prestigious annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2023.
The bioplatform innovation company, which is a member of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), has been named on the list that highlights this year’s “businesses at the forefront of their respective industries” which are “setting the standard with some of the greatest accomplishments of the modern world” and pave the way “for the innovations of tomorrow.”
“At Flagship Pioneering, we believe that bold scientific leaps can lead to big scientific breakthroughs and that those breakthroughs can be achieved in a systematic and repeatable way,” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering in the company’s press release.
Launched in 2000, Flagship Pioneering “conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category bioplatform companies to transform human health and sustainability” many of which, as the release emphasizes, “have invented entirely new modalities or therapeutic approaches, bred new plants, or introduced novel agricultural methods for measuring and rewarding carbon capture.”
Per the company’s data, Flagship Pioneering includes (among others) BIO member companies Moderna, which harnesses mRNA to instruct the body to make its own therapies, and Seres Therapeutics, which is revolutionizing treatment and prevention of a range of diseases by modulating the human microbiome.
Recognizing most cutting-edge groundbreakers
The full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies recognizes 540 organizations across 54 categories and regions “that are reshaping industries and culture.”
This year’s list, per Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan, “compiles some of the most cutting-edge groundbreakers who are changing our world every single day.”
“Everyone on this list does something completely, uniquely different, yet they all have one thing in common: innovation,” Vaughan emphasizes.
Other BIO members on the list
Recursion has found itself among the 2023 Most Innovative Companies in biotech at No. 7 “for removing human bias from drug discovery,” and according to Fast Company, “shows the promise of applying machine learning to drug discovery.”
The Salt Lake City-based company, as the list describes, “uses state-of-the-art lab automation and machine learning to empower novel drug discoveries.” It “began four new clinical trials of candidates from its pipeline in 2022, and entered a partnership with Genentech to identify and develop up to 40 new therapies for neuroscience and oncology.”
Bristol Myers Squibb ranked No. 18 on the list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023 for “crafting medication trials that work for everyone.”
The pharma giant also has a sweeping diversity agenda, investing over $150 million in clinical trial equity efforts over five years beginning in 2020 “with an emphasis on programs that address health disparities, clinical trial diversity, supplier diversity, and workforce representation.”
Ranked No. 20 on the Most Innovative Companies 2023 list and first in manufacturing is LanzaTech, a carbon capture, and transformation (CCT) company that “ferments industrial carbon emissions into useful products” and whose “recycled carbon has been used in everything from jet fuel to running shoes,” says Fast Company.
As the article notes, “to date, the company has produced more than 40 million gallons of ethanol, offsetting 200,000 metric tons of CO2.”
