Nagi Bioscience Raises CHF 1.8 M to Accelerate the Development of its "Organism-on-Chip" Technology

20.12.2019 11:56, Guillaume Tinsel

Nagi Bioscience SA, an EPFL spin-off in life-science-tech developing a revolutionary technology for the in vitro testing of drugs and chemicals, announced today the closing of a CHF 1.8 million Seed financing round. Investors in the round include the leading Swiss venture capital platform investiere, Zürcher Kantonalbank, NEST pension fund and private investors from Switzerland and United States. We interviewed Matteo Cornaglia, Ph.D., Co-founder & CEO of Nagi Bioscience.

Nagi Bioscience’s mission is to set a new standard for testing safety and e­fficacy of chemicals, cosmetics and drugs. Indeed, recent statistics assess that new substances are registered today at the impressive rate of one every 2.3 seconds in average! To protect people and environment from harm, potential adverse effects of this massive amount of substances must be thoroughly evaluated, typically via animal testing on vertebrate models, a solution which is time-consuming, expensive and currently raising growing ethical concerns by the public and governments. Nagi Bioscience aims to revolutionize the way toxic and beneficial effects of such new substances are tested today, by introducing the first “Organism-on-Chip” technology. It combines the use of microscopic worms called Caenorhabditis elegans, as validated alternative in vivo models for substance screening, with the first microfluidic laboratory device for their fully automated in vitro culture, treatment and analysis. Nagi Bioscience finally offers to its customers the possibility to perform “in vivo testing at the in vitro scale” by using an alternative to traditional animal testing which is faster, cost-effective and sustainable in the future.

How will the Seed investment round help achieve your vision?
We closed a Seed financing round of CHF 1.8 million from investors including investiere, Zürcher Kantonalbank, NEST pension fund and private investors from Switzerland and United States. This investment will be used to complete the development of Nagi Bioscience’s first product and prepare its market access. In addition, we will continue to work with our current industrial partners and expand our portfolio of collaborative projects in order to create new standardized worm-based bioassays dedicated to chemical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.

You won Venture Kick in 2019. How did Venture Kick help you lay the foundation for your growth and today's achievement?
Venture Kick tremendously helped us to improve our business plan, structure our commercial strategy and connect to investors for the current round of investment. Furthermore, this program is extremely helpful at motivating startup founders with a scientific background like us to get out of their lab and start discussing with customers as early and as much as possible, as key to understand real market needs and opportunities. Thanks to this approach, today we are already working with four key industrial players in our target markets, testing with them our solution and generating our first revenues.

You also participated in Venture Leaders Life Sciences in 2018. How did it help you lay the foundation for your growth and today's achievement?
Venture Leaders Life Sciences was a very intense experience and an extremely useful program as well. The days spent in Boston as part of the “Swiss National Startup Team Life Sciences 2018” were really effective at creating a new tight-knit team of entrepreneurs. I am still very well connected with this team today, one and a half years after the program itself, and this represents today for us a very important channel to keep exchanging information, opinions and precious advice among peer entrepreneurs. Moreover, Venture Leaders was key for the creation of our investor’s network: it is during one of my pitches in Boston that I had the opportunity to meet one of our current private investors. I really advise every new entrepreneur to participate to this program as soon as eligible for it.

When, and what, was your inspiration to found Nagi Bioscience?
It all started about 6 years ago, as a within-EPFL collaboration between the two company co-founders, Laurent and myself, from the actual need to automate C. elegans research and testing in EPFL life science laboratories. In fact, C. elegans is a very popular model organism in biomedical research, but the main issue faced by most of the laboratories around the world is that everything has still to be done manually. Thus, the idea was to combine C. elegans research with microfluidic technology firstly to automate current laboratory experiments and secondly to open new possibilities for industrial applications.

What is your advice for the potential bioscience entrepreneurs launching companies in Switzerland today?
Focus on customers, build a great multidisciplinary team and work hard towards a clear vision!
Nagi Bioscience aims to revolutionize the way toxic and/or beneficial effects of substances are tested today, by combining the use of microscopic worms as in vivo models for drug/chemical screening with the first technological platform for their fully automated in vitro culture, treatment and multi-parametric analysis. Their goal is to boost innovation and efficiency in pharmaceutical, cosmetic, chemical industries while contributing to the “replacement, reduction and refinement” of animal testing.