ZeClinics receives €1.87M funding in the latest round of the Horizon2020 SME Instrument Phase 2

ZeCardio

This highly competitive grant of 1.87 million €, finances 100% of the project "High-throughput cardiotoxicity screening (HTS) with zebrafish embryo"

ZeClinics did it again!

ZeClinics has been granted with the SME Instrument Phase 2 within the European Union framework Horizon 2020, category "Supporting Innovative SMEs in the healthcare biotechnology sector". The company, mono-beneficiary, receives € 1.87 million, 100% of the proposed budget for the project "ZeCardio: High-throughput cardiotoxicity screening (HTS) with zebrafish embryo".  The grant will allow ZeClinics to develop, and accelerate the commercialization, of one of our flagship products: ZeCardio. A predictive system cardiovascular impact analysis during the drug discovery phase, which we expect it will become the most advanced solution in the market. ZeCardio will have a high level of robotization that will allow evaluating hundreds of drugs daily, allowing ZeClinics to assess, with high predictive confidence, their possible cardiotoxic impact in humans.

One of the most important challenges biotech companies face is to get enough funding to turn their most innovative projects into reality. Especially, those that represent an important return to society, in the form of technical innovation, but which development represents a technological challenge and a high risk for the company that creates them.

Resultado de imagen de horizon 2020

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 the Horizon 2020, the EU's main research and innovation program, 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 face hundreds of excellent projects, but only a few are finally funded. This impressive competition, in the majority of cases against more consolidated companies than ZeClinics, multiplies our pride in achieving this distinction, but also increases our responsibility for successfully completing this innovative project.

ZeCardio is a platform that will combine the use of transgenic zebrafish embryos, a more advanced version of our ZeCardio® cardiovascular physiology analysis software, and robotic instrumentation that will accelerate and automate the drug screening process. This comprehensive platform will allow analyzing, in response to pharmacological treatments or cardiovascular disease genetic models, 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 analyzed 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 block of 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.).

ZeClinics will be able, through the use of ZeCardio, to analyze 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 analysis cost, introducing into the biotechnology, medical and pharmaceutical industry a tool capable of the cardiotoxicity early detection of thousands of molecules libraries.

This enormous opportunity means that ZeClinics can accelerate most of our R&D efforts and consolidate the company's foundations to face even more ambitious future challenges. The SME Instrument 2 will allow us to achieve a business growth of more than 400% of future turnover and EBITDA, 70% of the personnel and 500% of our productive capacity.

Let’s go ZeClinics!!!

“This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 755988”.