Magnitude Biosciences, a specialist contract research organisation (CRO) and Durham University spinout, has secured €1.5 million (£1.3 million) in funding to accelerate the commercialisation of VivoScanTM, its proprietary in vivo high-throughput screening (HTS) platform.
Northstar Ventures led the round through the North East Spinout Inspire Fund, the North East Innovation Fund and the Northstar EIS Growth Fund, alongside investment from Maven’s regional funds and new angel investors, with the funding also unlocking a further €253k (£217k) Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant.
Dr. Fozia Saleem, CEO of Magnitude Biosciences, says: “Our ambition is to become the first company to provide a platform to screen millions of compounds in a whole organism. This investment in VivoScanTM gives us the opportunity to turn that ambition into reality and fundamentally change the scale and speed at which drug discovery can be done.”
Magnitude Biosciences’ announcement comes amid continued 2026 investment in European platforms designed to improve the speed and quality of preclinical drug discovery.
EU-Startups has reported around €21.6 million across seven closely related or adjacent financings this year. Sightera Biosciences raised €3 million to develop its patient-derived, high-throughput drug-discovery platform. FluoSphera secured €1.23 million to advance its human-relevant preclinical models, while ALP Bio raised €1.9 million for its immune-organoid platform. Exobiosphere also secured €1 million to scale its orbital high-throughput screening technology.
The UK has also produced several comparable rounds, including €2.9 million for OutPost Bio, €3.15 million for drug-safety platform Sable Bio and €8.4 million for pharma R&D platform Helical.
Based in Durham, UK, and founded in 2018, Magnitude Biosciences helps drug developers evaluate potential treatments using living biological models. Its VivoScanTM platform is designed to screen large numbers of compounds in a whole organism rather than only in isolated cells or molecules.
The platform uses tiny C. elegans worms, which are widely used in biological research, to see how a whole organism responds to a possible treatment. It combines automated imaging, robotics and AI to analyse these responses quickly and in detail.
The company says this could help researchers identify promising drug candidates faster and understand their effects earlier in the development process. This may be particularly useful in areas such as ageing and neurodegenerative disease, where it can be difficult to predict how treatments will behave in a living system.
“We are building a platform that can move beyond simply screening more compounds.” continues Saleem. “VivoScanTM generates rich, whole organism biological data that can help researchers understand how potential therapies affect health, ageing and disease. By making data generation faster and more cost effective, we will be able to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies identify better drug candidates earlier and ultimately accelerate the development of new treatments.”
Source: EU-Startups
