Frequently Asked Questions

All you need to know about our services

“You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Why use C. elegans for drug discovery?

C. elegans is an established model organism that has enabled landmark discoveries in aging, development, neuronal function, and more. C. elegans possesses high gene conservation and homology to human proteins and cellular pathways, providing quantitative endpoints that are biologically relevant to complex diseases. C. elegans’ rapid life cycle and small size enable the screening of thousands of compounds, at a fraction of the cost compared with other models. All while avoiding regulatory or ethical restrictions.

Can C. elegans data predict human outcomes?

An estimated 60-80% of genes in C. elegans share homologs with humans. Key pathways associated with aging, metabolism, and neurobiology are well conserved between the nematode and humans, reflected by the growing use in longevity and neurodegeneration drug screening (1). The ease of genetic manipulation compared to other systems has enabled the creation of several established human disease phenotypes, such as those modelling Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and sensitivity to infections. Research utilizing these models has advanced our understanding of many human pathologies and has been translated into clinically successful therapies.

Why use C. elegans over established rodent models for drug screening?

While rodent models confer high translatability in certain disease areas, C. elegans enables drug screening at a fraction of the cost and time, while being highly amendable to high throughput screening. Translatability in rodents remain challenging for certain conditions, such as neurodegeneration, where reliable disease phenotypes are difficult to establish, often leading to costly failures (2).
In contrast, C. elegans has been utilised for the screening of thousands of compounds, filtering out misses early and streamlining pipelines in longevity, neurodegeneration, and drug repurposing, while bypassing ethical restrictions associated with mice.

Why use C. elegans over cell models for drug screening?

Cell models are powerful models for the high throughput screening of compounds, but translatability is unreliable in complex diseases. While 3D tissue cell models offer better translatability, they are less amenable to large scales and can be costly. C. elegans provides whole-organism data, while conserving key pathways in aging, metabolism, and neurodegeneration. Utilizing both models in compound testing generates complementary predictive data, de-risking the advancement to clinical trials.

Why use C. elegans over other small animal models (Drosophila melanogaster, Danio rerio)?

The fruit fly and the zebrafish are promising models for high throughput drug discovery given their translatability and scalability. However, certain characteristics hinder the automated manipulation of these organisms and high throughput capabilities remain underdeveloped compared to C. elegans. An added benefit of the worm is its amenability to modelling molecular disorders in HTS by utilising readily available RNAi libraries (3), which allow the manipulation of almost any gene function at any time in its life cycle.

What outputs do your C. elegans assays generate?

The simple and optically transparent body plan of C. elegans enables the automated, non-invasive detection of phenotypic changes utilising fluorescent markers, as done in our gut health, muscle health and transgenic assays. The behavioural translatability of C. elegans to age decline allow our WormGazer^™technology to go beyond alive/dead counts and produce multi-endpoint healthspan data throughout all life stages in our cognitive, longevity, and toxicity assays. With our HTS VivoScan™ platform, you can scale up your drug screening to hundreds of thousands of compounds in as little as one day. All endpoints are quantitative and biologically relevant, ensuring actionable insights for drug discovery.

I’m not familiar with C. elegans, are your assays still relevant to me?

Our team of C. elegans experts, with decades of combined experience, will aid you throughout the process, from designing an assay tailored to your needs to interpreting the results. All data will be presented in a comprehensive report and slide show, and our scientists will walk you through the findings to ensure they are fully understood and actionable.

Who have your C. elegans assays helped?

Can C. elegans data predict human outcomes?

Our platforms serve a wide range of industries and compounds, from biomedical R&D and goods manufacturing to academic research. For example, our longevity assays have revealed promising results for food supplements, lead compounds, and probiotics, allowing researchers to progress from pre-clinical development without relying on mammalian models. Read more on the successful application of our assays here.

Do you offer custom assay development?

Yes. Whether you want to validate your compound in a whole-organism or uncover its mode of action. Our platforms can be tailored to fit your compound(s), timeline, budget, and the depth of analysis you need. Our WormGazer^{^™}platform enables the screening of a range of outputs from simpler readouts like lifespan and healthspan, to more complex endpoints like behaviour and mechanistic analysis across different life stages. If you’re looking for scale, our High Throughput Screening platform VivoScan™ can identify leads from 100,000+ compounds and deliver lifespan data in as little as a day.

What are the limitations of C. elegans as a model?

C. elegans lacks homologs for adaptive immunity, oncology pathways, and complex organs, limiting its use in these disease areas. Pharmacokinetics and drug metabolism will also significantly differ from mammals and will therefore not be predictive of drug doses and toxicity. Despite not fully recapitulating human pathophysiology, C. elegans has established itself as a powerful tool in studying disease pathogenesis in areas such as aging and neurodegeneration and identification of promising therapeutics. While the worm is not here to replace the use of cell or mammalian models, it offers an accessible, cost-effective complementary system that lowers risk and accelerates drug discovery pipelines.

What makes WormGazer™ different from other C. elegans screening technologies?

Unlike platforms that use microchips, our worms are maintained in a natural, free-moving environment, ensuring native behaviour and reliable data. WormGazer™ enables continuous, high-frequency data acquisition across multiple plates per condition, capturing images every 0.8 seconds for 160 seconds, every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day, for up to 14 days. This generates up to a petabyte of biologically relevant data weekly, allowing detection of subtle differences between test conditions, identification of tight efficacy windows, and detailed dose-response analysis.

How scalable are your platforms for high-throughput screening?

Our VivoScan™ High-Throughput Screening platform is designed for scale. It can process 100,000+ compounds per day, delivering lifespan data in as little as 24 hours. Ideal for large drug libraries targeting longevity and cognitive health, where lack of transability in cell models can lead to low rates of efficacy and costly failures. For medium-sized libraries that require more robust outputs, our medium throughput platform can provide rich multi-endpoint data for 100-10,000 compounds.

References

1.           Roy PJ. Drug screens using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Genetics. 2025 Sept 1;231(1):iyaf141.
2.           Dawson TM, Golde TE, Lagier-Tourenne C. Animal models of neurodegenerative diseases. Nat Neurosci. 2018 Oct;21(10):1370–9.
3.           Giacomotto J, Ségalat L. High-throughput screening and small animal models, where are we? Br J Pharmacol. 2010;160(2):204–16.