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Magnitude Biosciences (revisited)

Magnitude biosciences petri dishes

 

AI-enabled Drug Discovery with C. Elegans

Two years ago, we profiled Magnitude Biosciences as a rising contract research organisation (CRO) applying whole-organism biology to longevity and nutraceutical research. Since then, the company has broadened its reach into pharmaceutical and biotechnology drug discovery, launched a new platform, and welcomed a new CEO. Here’s what’s changed.

 

Magnitude Biosciences today

Magnitude Biosciences is a UK-based organisation providing early-stage, scalable in vivo drug discovery services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, longevity, and nutraceutical companies worldwide.

One of the bottlenecks of early drug discovery is target crowding, in which the same biological targets are disproportionately exhausted. Magnitude Biosciences helps to bypass this, enabling a shift from target-based drug discovery to directly testing compounds on disease phenotypes. The company achieves this by generating rapid, high-content biologically relevant whole-organism data using Caenorhabditis elegans and its proprietary platforms, WormGazer™ and VivoScan™.

By combining automated phenotypic screening, ageing biology, and advanced imaging technologies, Magnitude helps organisations identify promising compounds earlier, de-risk development programmes, and generate biologically relevant datasets that strengthen AI-enabled drug discovery workflows within pharmaceutical companies.

 

What’s changed since 2024

Growth and traction

Magnitude Biosciences has now delivered more than 150 successful projects for over 60 clients across 12 countries, supporting programmes spanning neurodegeneration, CNS disorders, healthy ageing, metabolic disease, microbiome research, toxicity, and drug repurposing.

 

New Leadership

Founders Dr David Weinkove, Chair of the British Society for Research on Ageing (BSRA), and biophotonics expert Dr Chris Saunter set out to combine the predictive power of whole-organism biology with scalable automation. Today, the company is led by CEO Dr Fozia Saleem, an experienced biotechnology and commercial leader who has overseen Magnitude’s expansion from its roots in longevity and healthy ageing research into broader pharmaceutical applications and the development of high throughput screening capabilities and international collaborations.

 

A new platform: VivoScan™

Sitting alongside the original WormGazer™ imaging technology, the new VivoScan™ platform represents the next generation of automated early-stage in vivo high-throughput screening. Combining advanced imaging, robotics and proprietary analytics, WormGazer™ and VivoScan™ generate high-content phenotypic data at scale, assessing compound efficacy, toxicity, lifespan, healthspan, behaviour and disease-specific phenotypes on 1,000 to 10,000 compounds per run.

Positioned at the front end of the drug discovery pipeline, VivoScan™ complements traditional in vitro datasets with biologically relevant, whole-organism phenotypic data, supporting compound prioritisation, target validation and AI-enabled decision-making before progression into more resource-intensive mammalian studies.

 

A broader mission: New Approach Methodologies (NAMs)

Magnitude’s whole-organism approach now sits within the industry’s wider shift towards New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), non-mammalian models that can reduce reliance on vertebrate animal testing while still delivering biologically relevant, human-translatable data.

 

What is C. elegans and why is it used as a test organism?

Caenorhabditis elegans (“C. elegans”) is a microscopic nematode worm widely used as a model organism in research. Despite its small size, it possesses many biologically relevant features, including nerves, muscles and highly conserved molecular pathways linked to human disease. The anatomy of its development has been described in extraordinary detail, and one can map out the exact lineage of every cell in the body.

 

It offers several advantages for early-stage drug discovery:

  • High genetic conservation with humans, including many disease-relevant pathways.
  • Rapid and cost-effective screening of large compound libraries.
  • Whole-organism assessment of efficacy, toxicity, and healthspan effects.
  • Ability to capture complex biological interactions that are difficult to model in cell-based systems.
  • Support for New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) reducing reliance on vertebrate animal testing.
  • Proven utility in ageing, neurodegeneration, metabolic disease, microbiome research, and drug repurposing

 

The technology behind the data

WormGazer™, Magnitude’s original patented biophotonics platform, runs on a parallel architecture of multiple cameras, compact processing units and proprietary software, capturing and analysing data from hundreds of petri dishes simultaneously. VivoScan™ builds on this foundation by generating large-scale whole-organism datasets suitable for training AI models, and a dedicated suite of transcriptomics and tissue-specific downstream assays for Mechanism of Action (MOA) identification.

 

Get in touch

If you are interested in partnering with Magnitude Biosciences or would just like further information, please reach out to Strategic Allies for an introduction.