March 21st 2022
Lausanne, Switzerland
With its pioneer Organism-on-Chip technology, Nagi Bioscience has been bestowed the prestigious and highly selective EIC Accelerator Grant supporting breakthrough innovation in Europe, funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) for Swiss Startups. With the €2.5 million granted, Nagi will significantly advance the development and the commercial scale-up of its innovative products for large-scale automated in vivo testing of drugs and chemicals in the biological model C. elegans.
Nagi develops new scalable and customizable assay systems using C. elegans and other microorganisms within miniaturized chips as a new sustainable alternative to traditional animal testing. C. elegans is one the most used and validated biological model organisms in science, with a protracted recognition from the scientific community for more than 60 years. Nagi’s Organism-on-Chip technology enables working with C. elegans, for the first time, in a fully automated and standardized way to provide drug and chemical discovery with in vivo biological data at unprecedented speed, costs’ effectiveness, and confidence.
“We are thrilled to see Nagi Bioscience among the grantees of what is probably the most selective Startup funding program at European level. This recognition confirms the relevance and added value of Nagi’s technology, acknowledges the fantastic work of our team and pushes Nagi one step further in its mission to transform the field of biological testing” said Matteo Cornaglia, Nagi’s CEO and co-founder.
Since 2019, Nagi Bioscience offers tailored testing services by screening active compounds and drugs on transgenic and mutant C. elegans strains of interest for numerous applications in drug and chemical discovery. Having completed to date multiple successful projects with different customers across the pharma, biotech, agrochemicals and CROs sectors, Nagi’s next objective is to make their technology available to the market using the EIC Accelerator Grant for accelerating the development of their first generation of biological testing devices towards launch.
Chris Radloff, Board Director and Angel Investor at Nagi Bioscience states: “Winning the EIC Accelerator Grant is certainly a testimony to the attractiveness of Nagi’s innovations. The Grant will help Nagi Bioscience to further boost product industrialization and making the technology available to a broader group of toxicology testing laboratories and biopharma companies”.
Nagi’s technology combining microfluidics and microscopic worms aims to challenge the current biological testing standards while reducing costs, delays and ethical impact of product development pipelines across multiple industrial segments. Professing the transition to the new era of biological testing as their vision, being selected by the EIC Accelerator program is going to be crucial to make Nagi’s vision a reality.
About the SERI-funded EIC Accelerator Grant
With the aim of supporting innovative SMEs and Startup companies, the SERI-funded EIC Accelerator program provides financial and networking aid for project development and scaling up costs. Being the first EU company-focused program supporting the successful creation of tech enterprises in Europe, the EIC Accelerator program is known to be not only highly competitive, but also to have a notably challenging application process in order to guarantee quality and success rates.
Selected for funding by the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC) for breakthrough innovation, Swiss grantees are today directly financed by the State Secretariat of Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), following the declaration of Switzerland as third nation for EU projects in 2021.
About Nagi Bioscience
Founded in 2019, Nagi Bioscience started as a spin-off of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) pioneering the alternative biological testing landscape for the past 10 years. With its innovative Organism-on-Chip technology, Nagi aims to revolutionize the way new substances are tested today. Under the motto of in vivo testing at the in vitro scale, Nagi Bioscience works for the transformation of biological testing standards with faster, scalable, more efficient, ethical and sustainable methods allowing automated safety and efficacy testing of substances (drugs, cosmetics, chemicals, etc.) using microorganisms (C. elegans).
Contact Information
Email: info@nagibio.ch