Durham Spinout Lands $1.6M to Screen Millions of Compounds in Living Worms

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-15

Magnitude Biosciences, a contract research organisation and Durham University spinout, just raised about $1.6 million (€1.5 million) to speed up VivoScan™, its high-throughput screening platform that tests drugs in whole living organisms. That's a big deal if you've ever watched a promising drug fail late in trials because cells in a dish don't tell the whole story. ### Why This Investment Matters Northstar Ventures led the round through several funds, with Maven's regional funds and new angel investors joining in. The funding also unlocked an extra $274,000 (€253k) Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant. In plain terms: more money to turn a clever lab tool into a commercial product that pharma companies can actually use. Dr. Fozia Saleem, CEO of Magnitude Biosciences, didn't hold back: "Our ambition is to become the first company to provide a platform to screen millions of compounds in a whole organism. This investment in VivoScan™ gives us the opportunity to turn that ambition into reality and fundamentally change the scale and speed at which drug discovery can be done." ### A Wave of Preclinical Platform Bets This isn't happening in a vacuum. EU-Startups has tracked around $23.4 million (€21.6 million) across seven related financings this year alone. Sightera Biosciences raised $3.2 million for its patient-derived drug-discovery platform. FluoSphera secured $1.3 million for human-relevant preclinical models. ALP Bio pulled in $2.1 million for its immune-organoid platform. And Exobiosphere got $1.1 million to scale orbital high-throughput screening. The UK is pulling its weight too, with OutPost Bio at $3.1 million, Sable Bio at $3.4 million, and Helical at $9.1 million. Clearly, investors are betting big on better ways to test drugs before they hit humans. ### How VivoScan™ Actually Works Based in Durham, UK, and founded in 2018, Magnitude Biosciences helps drug developers evaluate treatments using living biological models. Their VivoScan™ platform screens large numbers of compounds in a whole organism—not just isolated cells or molecules. Here's the twist: they use tiny C. elegans worms, a workhorse of biological research. The platform combines automated imaging, robotics, and AI to watch how a whole organism responds to a possible treatment, quickly and in detail. - **Automated imaging** captures changes in the worms over time. - **Robotics** handle the repetitive work, so humans don't have to. - **AI** analyses the data to spot patterns that might signal a drug's effect. This could help researchers flag promising drug candidates earlier and understand their effects before spending millions on clinical trials. It's especially useful for ageing and neurodegenerative diseases, where predicting how a treatment behaves in a living system is notoriously tough. ### The Bigger Picture "We are building a platform that can move beyond simply screening more compounds," Saleem continues. "VivoScan™ 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." If that sounds ambitious, it is. But with $1.6 million fresh in the bank and a growing list of peers raising similar rounds, Magnitude Biosciences is positioning itself at the front of a shift toward smarter, organism-level drug screening. And for an industry that burns billions on failed trials, that's a shift worth watching.