Durham University spinout Magnitude Biosciences raises $1.3 million to scale a platform that screens drugs in living worms, not petri dishes.
There’s a particular kind of worm, about a millimeter long, that’s quietly become one of the most useful tools in aging research. C elegans has been a lab staple for decades because it shares a surprising number of genes and biological pathways with humans, and because researchers can watch its entire lifespan play out in a matter of weeks rather than years. A UK company built around exactly that idea, Magnitude Biosciences, just secured fresh funding to scale up what it’s doing with them.
The company, a contract research organization and Durham University spinout based in Sedgefield, has raised $1.3 million (£1.3 million) to accelerate the commercialization of VivoScan, its proprietary high-throughput screening platform. What makes VivoScan different from standard drug screening is right there in the name: it’s happening in a whole living organism, not in isolated cells or molecules in a dish.
Conventional high-throughput screening typically measures a handful of molecular or cellular endpoints. VivoScan instead uses hundreds of nematode worms at a time, combined with imaging, machine learning, and automation, to capture a much richer picture of how a compound actually behaves across a whole organism’s biology. The company says it can generate detailed, whole-organism data in weeks, compared to the years that similar work can take using traditional models.
Why worms, and why now
It sounds like an odd pitch until you consider how much drug development currently fails. Compounds routinely look promising in isolated cells, then fail once tested in a full organism, because biology doesn’t work in isolated pieces. A platform that captures whole-organism responses earlier in the process, rather than discovering the problem years and millions of dollars later, has an obvious appeal to pharmaceutical companies trying to cut both cost and failure rates.
“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,” said Dr Fozia Saleem, CEO of Magnitude Biosciences. “We are building a platform that can move beyond simply screening more compounds. VivoScan generates rich, whole organism biological data that can help researchers understand how potential therapies affect health, aging and disease.”
Saleem noted that making data generation faster and more cost-effective would enable them to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies identify better drug candidates earlier, which would ultimately accelerate the development of new treatments.
Northstar Ventures led the round, drawing on the North East Spinout Inspire Fund, the North East Innovation Fund, and the Northstar EIS Growth Fund, alongside investment from Maven’s regional funds and a group of new angel investors. The round also unlocked a further $217,000 grant (£217,000) through the Innovate UK Investor Partnership. It’s a fairly regional story in that sense, a company built on North East England’s university research ecosystem, funded largely by the same ecosystem’s investment infrastructure.
Magnitude has already delivered more than 120 projects for clients working across drug discovery, health and nutrition, and aging biology specifically, using its patented WormGazer technology alongside VivoScan. That last category is where the company’s ambitions and the longevity field’s needs line up most directly.
The bottleneck this actually solves
Aging research has a specific, stubborn problem: almost nothing about aging shows up quickly. A compound meant to extend healthspan can’t easily be tested the way a painkiller can, because the whole point is watching what happens over a long stretch of time, and mice alone take two to three years to show meaningful lifespan data. C elegans, with a lifespan measured in weeks, lets researchers run that same kind of longitudinal test dramatically faster, then flag the most promising candidates for further testing in mammals.
That’s precisely the gap Magnitude is aiming at. As the company put it in its own announcement, the goal is to help “accelerate the development of new drugs designed to extend the healthspan of our aging population.” Whether VivoScan becomes the industry-standard bridge between petri-dish chemistry and full clinical trials is still an open question, but the underlying bet, that screening in a living, aging organism beats screening in isolated cells, is one a growing share of the field seems to agree with.
