This Tiny Worm Platform Just Unlocked $1.6M for Drug Discovery

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-15

### A Durham Spinout Just Raised $1.6M to Rewrite Drug Discovery Magnitude Biosciences, a contract research organization (CRO) spun out of Durham University, has secured $1.6 million (about £1.3 million) to accelerate the commercialization of VivoScan, its proprietary in vivo high-throughput screening (HTS) platform. The round was led by Northstar Ventures through the North East Spinout Inspire Fund, the North East Innovation Fund, and the Northstar EIS Growth Fund, alongside Maven’s regional funds and new angel investors. The funding also unlocked an additional $274,000 (around £217,000) Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant. Dr. Fozia Saleem, CEO of Magnitude Biosciences, didn’t mince words: “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.” ### Why This Matters for Drug Discovery The announcement comes amid a wave of 2026 investment in European platforms designed to improve the speed and quality of preclinical drug discovery. EU-Startups has reported around $23.4 million across seven closely related or adjacent financings this year. Sightera Biosciences raised $3.25 million to develop its patient-derived, high-throughput drug-discovery platform. FluoSphera secured $1.33 million to advance its human-relevant preclinical models, while ALP Bio raised $2.06 million for its immune-organoid platform. Exobiosphere also secured $1.08 million to scale its orbital high-throughput screening technology. The UK has also produced several comparable rounds, including $3.14 million for OutPost Bio, $3.41 million for drug-safety platform Sable Bio, and $9.1 million for pharma R&D platform Helical. ### How VivoScan Works Based in Durham, UK, and founded in 2018, Magnitude Biosciences helps drug developers evaluate potential treatments using living biological models. Its VivoScan 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 analyze 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 aging 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. “VivoScan generates rich, whole organism biological data that can help researchers understand how potential therapies affect health, aging, 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.” ### The Bigger Picture So what does this mean for the broader startup ecosystem? For one, it shows that investors are still hungry for platforms that can shave years off the drug development timeline. And with the EU Inc proposal on the horizon, which aims to simplify company incorporation across Europe, we might see even more cross-border investment in biotech startups. The proposal could make it easier for companies like Magnitude Biosciences to attract funding from across the continent, not just their home country. For now, Magnitude Biosciences is focused on scaling VivoScan. If it works as promised, it could become a standard tool in preclinical research, helping to bring new treatments to patients faster. And that’s something we can all get behind.