Nagi Bioscience and InVirtuoLabs join forces to bring whole-organism biology into AI drug discovery

Nagi Bioscience, an EPFL spin-off based at EPFL Innovation Park, has announced a new partnership with InVirtuoLabs, based in Ticino, an AI-native drug discovery company. The partnership will feed experimental data from the C. elegans worm into InVirtuoLabs’ AI models.

InVirtuoLabs designs new molecules on its proprietary platform, which combines AI with molecular modeling. Nagi Bioscience tests them on C. elegans, a microscopic worm widely used in biomedical research, using its automated SydLab™ One platform. The results on efficacy, toxicity and whole-organism response then feed back into the design of each new round of molecules.

Closing the gap between prediction and biology

AI can speed up molecule design, but molecular and cell-based results alone cannot capture the complexity of a living organism. The partnership adds that missing layer of biological evidence early in discovery, so teams can make better-informed decisions about which candidates to advance.

“AI can now design more drug candidates than any team can test, and the bottleneck has moved to biology,” says Matteo Cornaglia, CEO and co-founder of Nagi Bioscience. “Nagi’s role is to help AI design–test–learn loops perform better and converge faster by plugging standardized whole-organism data into the equation.”

For Gianvito Grasso, CEO of InVirtuoLabs, “AI-driven drug discovery will advance fastest when models learn not just from existing data, but from the biological outcomes of their own predictions. By integrating Nagi’s whole-organism data into our design loop, we are connecting molecular design with biological reality.”

Two fast-growing Swiss players

InVirtuoLabs’ platform runs on InVirtuoGEN, its foundation model for chemistry. Two of its assets have already reached lead optimisation. The company has raised USD 10 million in 18 months, collaborates with Helsinn and was nominated for the Top 100 Swiss Startups 2026.

Nagi Bioscience was founded in 2019 and has raised more than CHF 14 million. Its Organism-on-Chip platform, SydLab™ One, combines microfluidics, robotics, imaging and AI-driven analytics. It has been on the market since 2023 and is used by biopharma, nutrition and academic teams in Europe, North America and Asia.

➡️ Source: Press Release