SUN Bioscience – one of EIT Health’s European Health Catapult winners 2017

Success continues for one of EIT Health Germany’s start-ups

SUN bioscience was among the winners (category BioTech) of the European Health Catapult (Regional Selection on 11 July 2017 in Heidelberg and International Competition on 5 December 2017 in London). SUN Bioscience develops life science technologies to scale and standardised organoids, miniature versions of human organs, that can be used as testbeds for pharmaceutical drug discovery and clinical diagnostics.

Pictured : The SUN bioscience team (left to right) – Jeroen van den Oever,Sylke Hoehnel, Nathalie Brandenberg. Photo courtesy of Suzanna Adamczewska-Bolle.

Their direct-outcome-based testing approach overcomes limitations of genetic biomarkers where treatments are just predicted based on a set of single, often non-correlated, factors.

With the help of public grants and SME loans from the canton of Vaud, SUN bioscience was able to build a custom production machine for their universal organoid culture and screening platform Gri3D®, which will be launched in the market during 2018.

Together with leading university hospitals in Switzerland, the EPFL Biomolecular Screening Facility and with the support of the Novartis Research Foundation and the Swiss Working Group for Cystic Fibrosis, a first clinical pilot study is underway to determine treatment efficacies on organoids grown from Cystic Fibrosis patients. This will be the first demonstration that organoid-driven precision medicine is possible at the scale needed for clinical and pharmaceutical screenings.

SUN bioscience was recently awarded the prestigious W.A. de Vigier award, the oldest and – with a cumulative annual prize money of 500 000 Swiss francs – the most financially significant award for start-ups in Switzerland (see complete news item here).

Click here to learn more about SUN bioscience.

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