After successful service projects, Nagi Bioscience eyes product launch

Since 2019, Nagi Bioscience offers tailored testing services by screening active compounds and drugs on transgenic and mutant microscopic worms, by its Latin name C. elegans strains of interest for numerous applications in drug and chemical discovery. The Swiss startup co-founded and led by Matteo Cornaglia has completed to date multiple successful projects with different customers across the pharma, biotech, agrochemicals and CROs sectors. As an illustration of the highly valuable outcomes of these activities, the results of Nagi’s latest project oranised in collaboration with the leading agrochemical group Bayer CropScience will be presented at the 61st Society of Toxicology (SOT) Annual meeting – the largest global toxicology conference – taking place in San Diego (CA) next week.

Nagi Bioscience is now ready for the next step. With its pioneer Organism-on-Chip technology, the Vaud startup has been bestowed the prestigious and highly selective EIC Accelerator Grant, funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) for Swiss Startups. Thanks to the €2.5 million grant, Nagi will significantly advance the development and the commercial scale-up of its innovative products such as the SydLab System for large-scale automated in vivo testing of drugs and chemicals in the biological model C. elegans.

“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.

Product launch by the end of this year

Nagi’s executive team doubled over the last months and counts today 12 talented professionals across different disciplines and from 9 different nationalities. The company targets the closing of a new round of investment (Series A) in 2022, to enter in the scale-up mode and keep the pace of its booming target market. Emerged over the last years, the market of “alternative testing methods” is already valued well above 1B and keeps growing at impressive rates. It is expected to become an established multi-billion market within a few years from now, driven by strong innovation and growing opposition against traditional animal testing worldwide.

Nagi Bioscience is ready to seize this market need opportunity with the official launch of the first product generation of the SydLab System by the end of this 2022 year. The CEO explains: “Having fulfilled the beta testing with satisfying feedback from our testers, the first single benchtop laboratory device for high-content screening of microorganisms is ready to hit the market and revolutionize the current testing standards. At Nagi we are really excited for this achievement and we are thrilled to announce that pre-orders of our device are now available.”

(ES)