Nagi Bioscience commercializing alternative to animal testing

Swiss EPFL spin-off Nagi Bioscience, a biotech start-up specialized in developing innovative alternatives to animal testing, announces today the commercialization of their first full product solution: SydLab One. Under the premise of unlocking the whole potential of micro-organisms as biological models for any lab, SydLab One combines Nagi Bioscience’s patented Organism-on-Chip microfluidic technology with cutting-edge robotics, machine learning, and biology to automate the entire process of culture, treatment, imaging, and multi-phenotypic analysis of small organisms within a single benchtop laboratory device.

SydLab One is the first all-in-one laboratory platform capable of performing end-to-end bioassays and high-content screening of drugs and chemicals on micro-organisms in a fully automated and standardized way. This does not only provide unprecedented data reproducibility and throughput, but also enables the generation of novel datapoints and assays. With the commercialization of SydLab One these possibilities can be now finally offered to any group striving to gain a deep understanding of the efficacy and/or toxicity effects of their drug candidates or chemicals, to boost their discovery programs and prevent late-stage pipeline failures.

“Nagi Bioscience could proof with many successful industry collaborations that the SydLab One platform leads to significant time and cost savings of C. elegans-based assays. Commercializing SydLab One as ready to use released product will make this solution accessible to a much larger customers base and it will propel the growth of Nagi Bioscience.”  explains Chris Radloff, PhD, board member of Nagi Bioscience and 25+ years expert on laboratory automation.

At the heart of Sydlab One’s technology is the use of the biological model C. elegans, a well-characterized microscopic nematode known for several Nobel prize-awarded discoveries, such as the apoptotic pathway (programmed cell death) and the RNA-mediated interference. “Small model organisms such as C. elegans are a true gift of Nature to Science and we’ll never stop discovering new parts of their immense potential. So far, the prevalence of manual protocols has been hiding plenty of possibilities, which we are now so excited to unlock with SydLab One. This was our main motivation to embark on the Nagi adventure about 10 years ago. Today, we are so thrilled to be finally able to empower other scientists through our technology and to promote altogether a much wider use of small organisms as alternatives to animal testing.” states Laurent Mouchiroud, PhD, CSO and co-founder of Nagi Bioscience.

Having validated the technology since the foundation of the company with several collaborators and customers across multiple segments, Nagi Bioscience finally enters the laboratory equipment market. As Nagi Bioscience’s CEO and co-founder Matteo Cornaglia, PhD, affirms: “To date, Nagi has been developing its technology and innovative bioassays hand-in-hand with its customers, which put us now in an ideal position to launch a product that truly empowers its users and provides them with a solution tailored to their needs. We are truly proud to introduce into the market SydLab One, and strongly believe in its potential to revolutionize the current standards for small-organism-based testing. This is the result of several years of great teamwork at Nagi and, as a team, we are so excited to hit such an amazing milestone today and ready for this awaited market entry.”