Pharmaceutical, chemical and biomedical research still strongly rely on traditional in vivo experiments based on vertebrate animals. While animal testing is increasingly resource-consuming and today subjected to growing ethical and legal issues, alternative in vitro cellular models do not allow extracting phenotypic data at the whole-organism level, which, however, are often key to study complex human processes or diseases, such as neurodegeneration, age-related diseases, or reproductive toxicity effects.
Hence, how can we study and screen new candidate drugs and chemicals in a fast, ethical, cost-effective way with respect to their toxic and/or therapeutic impact on biological processes at whole-organism level? Nagi Bioscience allows revolutionizing the way toxic and therapeutic effects of substances are assessed today by introducing the first all-in-one device for fully automated culture, treatment and high-content screening on Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) and other complex biological models. The usage of C. elegans model has gained popularity during the last decades due to their small size, ease of treatment and, above all, for its powerful genetic toolkit and conserved biology (translatability to human biology). However, technical limitations for its manipulation and observation (current manual methods) still limit its full potential. Nagi’s newly launched product SydLab™ One combines cutting-edge microfluidics, robotics, computer vision and machine learning to fully standardize and automate the whole C. elegans experimentation process and analysis. As an end-to-end solution, SydLab™ One benchtop laboratory device works with disposable microfluidic cartridges - the patented Nagi™ Chips - and the AI-based SydLab™ Analyzer software to automate data analysis and interpretation, obtaining proven unprecendented levels of standardization and reproduciblity.
Nagi Bioscience is a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and based at the EPFL Innovation Park (Switzerland). Nagi’s solution builds on 12+ years of research initiated at EPFL by the company’s founding team, who owns an internationally recognized reputation as pioneers in combining microtechnology, machine learning and C. elegans research to create innovative technologies to fuel the new era of biological testing and empower research. Currently counting with a multi-disciplinary team to make such complex technology possible while improving scientists research and pipelines effortlessly, the Nagi team aims to boost the spread of their vision through SydLab™ One: “in vivo testing at the in vitro scale”.
