One of the most important challenges for biotech companies is to get enough funding to turn their most innovative projects into reality. Especially those that may give significant returns to society, in the form of technical innovation, but whose development is a technological challenge and a high risk for the company that creates them.

A few days ago the EU awarded ZeClinics the SME Instrument Phase 2, the most important and outstanding grant for small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe. This powerful funding tool is part of Horizon 2020, the EU's main research and innovation programme, with a total budget of €77 billion to be invested in projects of excellence. The objective of the SME Instrument is to promote highly innovative projects to transform them into concrete commercial solutions with high social and economic impact, both in Europe and globally. However, proposing an innovative idea is not enough to be financed by the SME Instrument. Its evaluators are faced with hundreds of excellent projects, but only a few are finally funded. “This impressive competition, in the majority of cases against more established companies than ZeClinics, makes us even prouder to achieve this distinction, but it also increases our responsibility to successfully complete this innovative project”, say the company founders, Davide D’Amico, Javier Terriente, Ignasi Sahún and Simone Calzolari.

ZeCardio®, a platform that will combine the use of transgenic zebrafish embryos, is a more advanced version of the existing ZeCardio® cardiovascular physiology analysis software, and robotic instrumentation that will accelerate and automate the drug screening process. This comprehensive platform will allow analysing, both in response to pharmacological treatments and genetic models of cardiovascular disease, multiple parameters of the cardiac physiology and vascular system in hundreds of zebrafish embryos daily. The automated acquisition of high-frequency videos of hearts and blood vessels will be analysed with ZeCardio®, which, thanks to its advanced image analysis algorithms, will allow the quantification of the most complex cardiotoxicity parameters, including those difficult to assess currently in preclinical models (cardiac frequency, arrhythmias, atrio-ventricular blockage of the first, second and third degree, ejection fraction, etc.) and extending them to the evaluation of vascular physiology (blood flow velocity in veins and arteries, vasodilation, vasoconstriction, etc.).

Through the use of ZeCardio, ZeClinics will be able to analyse all these parameters in an automated way and in a large number of individuals simultaneously (Industrial Scale-up). Therefore, this technology will substantially reduce time and, consequently, the resulting cost of analysis, introducing to the biotechnology, medical and pharmaceutical industries a tool capable of the achieving the early detection of cardiotoxicity in hundreds of thousands of molecules.

“This huge opportunity means that ZeClinics can accelerate much of our R&D pursuits and consolidate the bases of the  company to tackle even more ambitious challenges. The SME Instrument 2 will allow us to achieve a business growth of more than 400% of future turnover and EBITDA, cover 70% of contracted personnel costs and will increase our productive capacity by 500%”, conclude the founder members,.

ZeClinics is supported by Pompeu Fabra University and was created by the researchers at the University, Davide D'Amico, Javier Terriente, Ignasi Sahún and Simone Calzolari. Its mission is to challenge the traditional drug discovery pipeline by offering a cheap, fast and reliable array of customized assays, to assess the safety and biomedical relevance of new molecules using zebrafish.

ZeClinics Founder team (from left to right): Ignasi Sahún, Simone Calzolari, Davide D'Amico i Javier Terriente - ZeClinics