EPFL Innogrants

Five EPFL-based startups: Alpion CryoSolutions, Eleum,  Feedback Intuitive, MOLECL, and NourishAI are the latest recipients of the EPFL Startup Launchpad Innogrant and Innogrant for biotherapeuthics. Each team has secured CHF 100,000 to accelerate the development of their technology. 

Alpion CryoSolutions

Cryo-electron microscopy has transformed biology by allowing researchers to see proteins in extraordinary detail. However, existing technology only allows these molecules to be seen in a static state. In reality, proteins move, change shape, and have interactions which determine how they function. These dynamics are central to drug discovery, where researchers need to understand how proteins change in order to design effective new medicines. Existing instruments struggle to capture these rapid changes – particularly at the microsecond timescale where many processes occur.

The Alpion team – based in Professor Christoph Bostedt’s LUXS lab – has developed technology which allows researchers to capture protein molecules mid-movement. Their laser-based system briefly melts frozen samples, giving the proteins a fraction of a second to move before rapidly refreezing them. This makes it possible to trap and image short-lived shapes that may otherwise remain invisible, providing a more complete picture of their structure and enabling more accurate three-dimensional reconstructions. Compact and user-friendly, their instrument integrates into standard cryo-EM workflows.

The team will use their Innogrant to transform their prototype into a robust pre-commercial product ready for pilot deployment.

Eleum

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is an inflammatory bowel disease affecting the large intestine. It causes intestinal ulcers, leading to abdominal pain, diarrhoea, and weight loss that severely impact quality of life. Current treatments mainly work by suppressing the immune system to reduce inflammation — but do not directly heal the intestine lining, which is a key predictor of long-term remission. Research increasingly suggests that certain modifications of the gut microbiome contribute to the disease. For instance, patients with UC tend to have low levels of a particular class of microbial metabolites called secondary bile acids. These molecules produced by gut bacteria have been shown to play a crucial role in repairing the intestine lining.

The Eleum team, based in Professor Kristina Schoonjans’ Laboratory of Metabolic Signalling at EPFL, is developing a new type of treatment called a Live Biotherapeutic Product, or LBP. Unlike probiotics, which are often used for general health, LBPs are designed to prevent, treat, or cure specific diseases by targeting known biological pathways. Eleum’s therapy introduces specific bacteria in the gut that restore the body’s production of secondary bile acids and return the bile acid balance to that of healthy individuals. This has been shown to help the gut heal faster and strengthen the gut barrier by supporting the body’s natural ability to regenerate the intestinal lining. By restoring this key metabolic pathway, this therapeutic approach aims to promote long-term remission for UC patients.

The team will use their Innogrant to prepare their therapy for clinical use – establishing the quality controls required by regulators and optimising the preparation protocol to maximise bacteria engraftment in the gut.

Feedback Intuitive

Sports performance is increasingly data-driven, with athletes and teams relying on metrics to optimise training and competition. Yet, ‘Recovery’ – although critical for injury prevention and long-term development – still remains hard to quantify. Most athletes rely on indirect indicators such as heart rate or sleep scores to judge their readiness. While useful, these metrics do not reveal what’s happening inside the specific muscles that have done the work. As a result, training decisions are often made without a clear picture of muscular recovery.

Feedback Intuitive – a team based in Professor David Atienza’s Embedded Systems Laboratory – is developing a compact wearable that measures oxygen levels directly in targeted muscles during training sessions. By tracking how quickly a muscle re-oxygenates after effort, the system provides a direct measure of local fatigue and recovery. Combined with broader metrics in a single wearable, the team hopes to make muscle-specific recovery measurable in everyday training, not just in specialised labs.

The team will use their Innogrant to create a field-ready MVP and conduct structured athlete pilots, generating the evidence needed for the next stage of development.

MOLECL

Protein modifications play an important role in many biological processes and are closely linked to human health and the performance of biological therapeutics. However, current analytical methods for detecting these modifications are often slow, costly, and lack the ability to precisely identify structural variations at the molecular level. As a result, important molecular information can remain hidden, limiting the effectiveness of biological analysis and contributing to inefficiencies in healthcare and biotechnology.

The MOLECL team is developing a new approach for analyzing protein modifications using nanopore based sensing. By combining solid state nanopores with molecular recognition strategies, the technology enables analysis of individual protein molecules and the structural features associated with their modifications. This single molecule approach provides a new way to detect subtle molecular differences that are difficult to observe with existing bulk measurement techniques.

The team will use their Innogrant to advance from early laboratory proof-of-concept to clinical validation, testing their assay against real patient samples at CHUV.

NourishAI

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurological disease for which there is no cure. ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neurone disease) attacks the nerve cells responsible for controlling voluntary movement. Over time, the brain loses its ability to send signals to the muscles and patients become unable to move, speak, swallow, and eventually breathe. ALS can also disrupt the body’s metabolism. Around two thirds of patients have already lost weight by the time they are diagnosed, and even a small drop in body mass index is associated with significantly faster disease progression. Despite this, nutritional care for ALS patients remains generic – based on broad caloric guidance and supplements, with little account for the fact that each patient’s metabolism behaves differently.

The NourishAI team, based in Professor Johan Auwerx’s Laboratory of Integrative Systems Physiology at EPFL, is building a data-driven approach to nutrition in ALS. Their platform combines genetic, metabolic, and clinical data from ALS patient cohorts. They then use machine learning to identify which nutrient pathways are most predictive of disease progression in individual patients. The goal is to move from observation to intervention: offering a personalised nutritional framework based on the patient’s specific metabolic profile. The team is working in collaboration with Swiss neuromuscular centres in St. Gallen, Geneva and Lausanne, and will integrate with the MyFoodRepo platform – developed at EPFL – to enable real-world food logging and biomarker tracking.

The team will use their Innogrant to validate their computational findings against clinical data and develop a working prototype of the NourishAI decision tool for use by clinicians.

Source: EPFL | 📸 ©EPFL