Magnitude Biosciences raises £1.3M to scale whole-organism drug screening at industrial speed

Magnitude Biosciences (Durham) has raised £1.3 million (approximately €1.5 million), backed by Northstar Ventures (investing via the North East Spinout Inspire Fund, North East Innovation Fund, and Northstar EIS Growth Fund) and Maven Capital Partners (regional funds), with additional angel investors. The round also unlocks a £217,000 Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant. Founded in 2018 by Dr. Fozia Saleem as a Durham University spinout, the company is scaling VivoScan — a drug-discovery platform that screens candidates in living C. elegans nematodes using AI, robotics, and high-throughput imaging.

The stage of the round has not been stated by the company or its investors.

The whole-organism premise

Drug discovery has a translation problem. The dominant early-screening model uses cell-based assays: compounds are tested against isolated cells in culture for target engagement, toxicity, and basic biological activity. Cell assays are fast, cheap, and scalable to millions of compounds. They are also systematically misleading: cells in isolation behave differently from cells embedded in a living organism, with a functioning metabolism, a nervous system, and genuine tissue interactions. The result is a pipeline full of compounds that pass cell screens and fail in animals.

Magnitude Biosciences' bet is that C. elegans — a 1mm nematode with a fully mapped nervous system, transparent body, and a 60–80% overlap with human disease-related gene sequences — provides a whole-organism screen at a cost and speed that sits between cell assays and mammalian models. VivoScan uses robotics to handle nematode cultures at scale, AI-driven imaging to extract phenotypic readouts from living organisms, and machine learning to classify compound effects across hundreds of biological parameters simultaneously.

Dr. Fozia Saleem: "Our ambition is to become the first company to provide a platform to screen millions of compounds in a whole organism."

The existing validation is credible: seven external trials with Vertify; industrial-scale equipment under development with Demcon (a Dutch precision engineering company that has built robotics for ASML and other deep-tech clients); ESA BIC incubation (European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre). Durham University's Department of Biosciences contributed the foundational research.

The funding and what it builds

Northstar Ventures is the leading early-stage VC in the North East of England, with a focus on university spinouts and deep-tech companies with long development timelines. Maven Capital Partners brings regional investment and commercial scale-up experience. The Innovate UK grant co-investment signals that the scientific claims behind VivoScan have been reviewed by independent technical assessors — a meaningful external validation for a platform at this stage.

The use of funds is primarily throughput: moving from current laboratory-scale operation to a platform capable of processing millions of compounds in whole organisms, which requires both the robotics pipeline Demcon is building and the AI models to handle the resulting imaging data at scale. The research expansion into ageing and neurodegenerative disease adds a second commercial front alongside the pharma partner model.

£1.3 million is a modest raise for the ambition of screening millions of compounds in living organisms, and the timeline to that scale will depend on the Demcon equipment roadmap. What makes the round interesting is not the amount but the combination: a credible founder (spinout with eight years of platform development), a credible industrial partner (Demcon's precision robotics track record), and a clear scientific differentiator (whole-organism phenotypic data at scale) that is genuinely difficult to replicate quickly.