Company mission
ACX was founded on the conviction that biology, at its most fundamental level is programmable and that with the right tools and structural understanding biological function can be designed rather than discovered.
Our mission is to redefine crop protection by developing bioengineered solutions that scale seamlessly, reduce chemical dependence, promote biodiversity and enhance global food security.
The team
Founders
Emmanouela is a biochemist, biophysicist, and biotech entrepreneur with more than a decade of research experience spanning structural biology, infectious disease, cancer, plant pathology, and drug discovery. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University of Cambridge, where she used cryo-EM, cryoET, biochemical assays, and cellular systems to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying drug resistance. Her doctoral work included determining 26 previously unresolved atomic-resolution structures of efflux-pump nanomachines and developing a new nanostructure-tagging method for identifying proteins inside crowded cellular environments. Her research has spanned Cambridge, Imperial College London, Barts Cancer Institute, Institut Curie, and King’s College London, and has contributed to multiple peer-reviewed publications. Today, she is co-founder of ACX, where she is translating first-principles biophysics into programmable biological molecules designed for real-world industrial applications.
Melina is a computer scientist, engineer, and biotech entrepreneur with research experience spanning artificial intelligence, natural language processing, robotics, digital health, and computational systems. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from King’s College London, where her work focused on developing interactive systems, frameworks, and tools for complex real-world applications. Her research career has included work at the University of Cambridge, the National Health Service (NHS) in England, and the Francis Crick Institute, spanning both software and hardware development. Within the NHS, she worked on clinical trials evaluating digital health interventions in real-world care settings. Her work has contributed to multiple peer-reviewed publications and has consistently sat at the intersection of computation, engineering, healthcare, and the life sciences. At ACX, she bridges computer science and biology to build the computational infrastructure and scalable engineering systems underlying ACX’s programmable biology platform.
