Enantios off to a good start

New pharmaceutical drugs are increasingly complex in molecular structure, and there are no measurement tools able to measure the important aspects of new, more complex molecules. Because measuring molecular structure is an essential aspect in drug discovery, development and manufacturing, the current technological gap is preventing new and even more promising pharmaceutical drugs from moving through the discovery and development pipeline and increasing costs for manufacturing existing drugs. 

During the past five years at the ETH, ENANTIOS has developed a measurement device capable of fully characterizing complex molecules, including chiral molecules and biologics. The technology enables complete, nondestructive characterization of a wide range of molecules much more quickly and cheaply than other available techniques and can resolve structures that are impossible to measure with existing tools. Enantios can resolve key aspects of complex molecular structures related to chirality that other technologies cannot see. The startup team provides its technology as a measurement instrument and measurement service to enable faster screening of molecular structure early in the drug development process and more complete testing of quality in manufacturing.

Established in December 2022, ENANTIOS has a functional prototype of its patent-pending measurement instrument that is already operational. Carin Lightner, the CEO and co-founder, stated, “We are currently utilizing our prototype for measuring publicly available pharmaceutical molecules and collaborating with pharma and chemical manufacturing customers for proof-of-concept studies.” The commercial version, expected to launch in Q4 2024, will initially target the pharmaceutical development sector.

At the end of last year, Enantios received fresh funding from the student VC S2S Ventures as part of a bridge funding round, which saw the participation of the Zürcher Kantonalbank. The round raised CHF 225k of convertible loan. The funding complements previous support from that Venture Kick Stage 2 and 200K in non-dilutive funding from the ESA Bic Switzerland and CHF 130K from Bridge Proof of Concept. In total, the startup has secured CHF 300k equity. A larger financing round is planned to accelerate the time to market and expand the team. Today, Enantios employs four people with an advisory board of four. “We are finalizing contracts for our measurement-as-a-service product and securing sales for our first measurement instruments in academic research labs,” added Carina.

(RAN)