Nagi Bioscience SA, a Swiss life-science-tech company developing a revolutionary technology for the in vitro testing of drugs and chemicals, announced today the closing of a €1.6 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 the United States. The funds will be used to complete the development of Nagi Bioscience’s first product and prepare its market access.
Nagi Bioscience, a spin-off from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), was founded in January 2019, in Lausanne. Nagi Bioscience has developed an innovative “Organism-on-Chip” technology, aiming to revolutionize the way toxic and beneficial effects of substances are tested today. This technology relies on the combined use of microfluidics and microscopic worms (the validated biological model C. elegans) to provide a new sustainable alternative to traditional animal testing to pharma, chemical, cosmetic industries and biomedical research. This solution complies with the emerging directives for the replacement, reduction and refinement of animal testing, i.e. the so-called “3Rs” principles, and allows significantly reducing costs and delays of pharmaceutical and chemical research.
“Complex drug efficacy and safety tests that would take months using traditional animal testing now can be carried out on our microfluidic device in only a few days, at a fraction of their current cost and in a fully automated way” says Dr. Matteo Cornaglia, the founder and CEO of the company. “Nagi Bioscience is a great team of dedicated people sharing the vision to create a new class of solutions for faster, cost-effective and sustainable drug and chemical testing in the future. The whole team is excited and honored to get great investors on board that are sharing this vision and providing their expertise to accelerate commercialization and widespread use of our technology”.
Furthermore, the company announces the assignment of Dr. Chris Radloff to the Board of Directors. “I’m following Nagi Bioscience since more than a year and I’m excited to be part of the next phase developing this innovative idea between life science and microfluidics into a business”, says Dr. Radloff. Chris is a board director and angel investor in several startup companies and brings to the company 20+ years of expertise in the life-science-tech field.
