Progressing from candidate to clinic is no easy feat. Out of every 10,000 compounds screened, only 1 reaches the market¹.

We believe in the power of the worm to address the unmet needs of pharmaceutical R&D but didn’t have the scale the industry needed. Our founders were challenged by key players in drug discovery to dramatically increase the throughput of in vivo compound screening while decreasing cost. After 2 years of pioneering innovation, we launched VivoScan™: the world’s first whole-organism phenotypic screening platform at high-throughput scale.


Live C. elegans are liquid-cultured and precision-dispensed into 384-well plates. Survival and mobility are continuously monitored with rapid widefield video imaging, enabling in vivo screening of age-related and disease phenotypes without the regulatory constraints of mammalian models. Our patented technology allows us to screen drug libraries from $1 per compound*, with readouts in a matter of weeks.

*per compound pricing dependent on scale

Unmet Need

Cells can’t model diseases that occur at organism-level interfaces.  Biomarkers are fundamentally deficient in the context of disease models.

VivoScan™ Answer

C. elegans is a whole organism with complex interfaces absent in cell culture, i.e. host-microbe interactions or the neuromuscular junction.

Between 20 and 40 organoids are needed to replace a regulatory mammal. Even when using organoids to capture common failures rather than recapitulate a whole system, 4-5 organoids are still used. 

As a whole organism, C. elegans can help break false links in existing data sets.

Cells don’t exhibit normal organismal ageing, so it’s difficult to investigate links between age and disease progression. There is a lack of quick, economical ageing models.

C. elegans share the same core pathways that regulate ageing as humans but have a mean lifespan of only 3 weeks* in liquid culture/on the VivoScan™ platform.

in silico screening is modelled on data from cell-based HTS – and vice versa – but faulty inputs jeopardise translatability down the line.

VivoScan™ expands the inputs at every stage of R&D, helping to build on existing datasets. 

Phenotypic screening is too costly to be a priority.

VivoScan™ brings the in vivo validation of compounds’ in vitro effects towards the start of the preclinical pipeline – at a price point comparable to cells.

Our low solution volume of only 75 µL per well​ helps minimise compound synthesis costs​.

Lifespan and healthspan are hallmark endpoints to assess organismal health, but investigating both requires duplicating studies.

VivoScan™ tracks lifespan and healthspan concurrently from the same wells, saving costs and eliminating reproducibility issues.

Back to the Beginning

VivoScan™ is not a replacement for cell-based screening, but an expansion to your data package for more informed decision making.

Most early discovery pipelines are built on low-dimensional inputs. Cell-based HTS, single biomarkers, and simplified in vitro models generate fast data, but they strip out system-level interactions. These limitations propagate downstream, constraining in silico models, misdirecting lead optimisation, and contributing to late-stage failure.

By supplementing existing HTS, in silico, and medicinal chemistry workflows with scalable in vivo data, VivoScan™ helps eliminate false positives and negatives, de-risking preclinical and clinical studies before they begin.