Behind Aquila Bioscience's EIC Accelerator Award for Germ Wipes

Aquila Bioscience, a University of Galway spin-out founded in 2012 by glycoscience professor Lokesh Joshi, makes a wipe that does not kill germs. Its cellulose fibres carry sugar and protein molecules that viruses, bacteria and fungi mistake for human cells; the pathogens bind to the wipe and are lifted off the skin with it. The European Commission picked the project, ABwipe, in the COVID-19 strand of the EIC Accelerator pilot's March 2020 cut-off, as the only decontamination product among the coronavirus projects in its list of selected companies, and paid €1,940,968.75 towards a €2,772,812.50 project that ran from August 2020 to January 2023, according to CORDIS. The Commission's list gives the project a single row, and CORDIS names Aquila as its only participant.

The project's first goal was to take the wipe "from a laboratory prototype to a commercial large-scale manufacturing environment". The final report records pilot batches of ">2,000+ units" made in-house. Independent lab results and customer pilots arrived; the factory did not. Six years after selection, the company is still filing accounts and now markets the mechanism as a technology to license.

Where Aquila Stands Now

Aquila Bioscience Limited is a live company. Its status at the Companies Registration Office is "Normal", and it filed an annual return with financial statements made up to 13 August 2026, received on 8 October 2026, along with a return of allotments, the form used to report newly issued shares, received in March 2026, according to CRO filings listed by Business Barometer. OpenCorporates confirms the company number, the "Normal" status, the Moycullen registered address and annual returns filed in 2023, 2024 and 2025. The filed accounts are not free to view, so revenue, losses, equity and the size of the 2026 share issue could not be checked.

The company website now leads with licensing, not wipes: it offers its "Pathogen Capture Technology" to manufacturers of wipes, gels, sprays, filters and coatings, and says the technology is supplied to partners in consumer care and medical devices in equal shares. It names no licensee. Its two products, the AB Decontamination Device (the renamed ABwipe) and ProShield Mask Spray, are both listed as "available now". The latest milestone on its history page is joining the European Space Agency's Discovery Programme. The University of Galway and Silicon Republic reported that ESA project, to adapt the technology for decontamination on long space missions, in January 2025. Aquila's evidence page puts it at €175,000 from January 2025 to June 2026; neither news report gives an amount.

Aquila is not among the companies listed in the EIC Fund portfolio, checked across all 17 pages of the list on 14 October 2026, which fits a grant-only award. No venture round, investor or acquisition could be found.

How a Wipe Can Capture Instead of Kill

Viruses, bacteria and fungi infect by latching onto carbohydrates, called glycans, on the surface of human cells. Aquila screened sugars that biothreat agents bind to with a microarray, then attached them to a cellulose-based material, as the company described in its 2018 Phase 1 feasibility project, Glyco-DeCon, which received €50,000. The pathogen sticks to the decoy in the wipe instead of the person, and leaves with the wipe.

The established alternatives are alcohol, bleach, quaternary ammonium compounds and other biocides. ABwipe's CORDIS objective argues they "cannot be used repeatedly on skin" and harm the environment. Aquila's pitch rests on three differences: the wipe can be used around the eyes, nose and mouth; because it does not kill, it puts no selection pressure on microbes to become resistant; and it keeps the captured pathogens intact, so they can be sent to a lab for forensic identification. The last two are the company's claims; no independent study of resistance or forensic use could be found.

The technology came out of defence work. On 12 March 2020, eight days before the EIC cut-off, the university announced that Aquila and the Irish Defence Forces had worked on the wipe for over four years with the Department of Defence and the European Defence Agency, and that the Defence Forces had committed to buying a consignment for troops, according to the University of Galway. The company's product page says it was developed with the Irish and Czech military.

What the EIC Grant Promised, and What It Produced

The EIC Accelerator pilot's March 2020 round drew almost 4,000 applications, more than 1,400 of them related to the coronavirus. The Commission funded 36 coronavirus projects with about €166 million, naming "scaling up the production of bio-decontamination wipes" among them, according to its 8 June 2020 announcement. ABwipe's grant agreement was signed on 27 July 2020, and the project ran on schedule for 30 months, from 1 August 2020 to 31 January 2023, per CORDIS.

The final periodic report sets three work objectives. Two were met. The French lab NeoVirTech found that the wipe removed between 99.9% and 99.99% of SARS-CoV-2 from human skin explants, and pilot studies were held with potential customers. In practice, the wipes reached real users during the project: in August 2020 Aquila won a tender to supply them to up to 4,000 educational institutions, Galway Bay FM reported, and in October 2020 the University of Galway said the Department of Education had approved them as emergency PPE for about 4,000 schools. The CORDIS results article adds that end users in Czechia, Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States had used the device. How many wipes were sold, and for how much, has never been published.

The third objective, large-scale commercial manufacturing, was not reached. The report describes a transfer to "an in-house manufacturing process" with pilot batches of more than 2,000 units, and no later announcement describes a production line, a contract manufacturer or volumes beyond that.

1. Independent efficacy testingDeliveredNeoVirTech skin test, reported by CORDIS and the university.
2. Customer pilotsDeliveredSchools tender and Defence Forces use.
3. Large-scale manufacturingNot achievedIn-house pilot batches of 2,000+ units only.
4. US FDA Class I registrationUnverifiedClaimed by Aquila; not in current FDA data.

The test results themselves are reported two ways. The CORDIS report gives a range of 99.9% to 99.99%; the university's October 2020 release and a BreakingNews.ie report in November 2020 give 99.99%; the company's product page today says 99.9%. All rest on one lab study, whose report Aquila shares only under a non-disclosure agreement.

The company says it was registered with the US Food and Drug Administration as a foreign manufacturer of a Class I device, under owner/operator number 10074735. A search of the FDA's device registration and listing data through openFDA on 14 October 2026 returned no entry for Aquila Bioscience, only two unrelated Aquila companies in China and the United States. Whether and when the registration ended could not be verified.

After the Pandemic

Since the project ended, Aquila's record shows a search for new uses. In March 2021 it launched ProShield, a spray that coats reusable fabric masks with the same capture molecules; the University of Galway reported test improvements of 94% to 99.5% across fabrics, without naming the lab. Its history page lists "PathCap" swabs and filters developed in 2023 and 2024, then commercial partnerships and end-user trials in 2024 and 2025, without naming partners. Its pipeline page describes a membrane that enriches pathogens ahead of detectors and skincare uses against skin bacteria and fungi; both are marked as in development.

A University of Galway profile says the wipes and mask spray reached the US and UK markets during the pandemic and lists Defence Forces Ireland, the Irish postal service and Irish health services among users. It gives 15 employees; the company's website now shows a team of 10. The profile is undated, so it cannot show whether the team shrank. Without accounts, it is not possible to say whether the company is growing.

Why It Matters for Europe

The COVID-19 pandemic led the EU to create the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, HERA, to secure the development, manufacturing and stockpiling of medical countermeasures, from medicines to masks. A skin-safe decontaminant for first responders that can be made in Europe fits that brief, and Aquila's origins in European Defence Agency work tie it to the EU's biodefence agenda. The non-killing approach also speaks to antimicrobial resistance, which causes more than 35,000 deaths a year in the EU and EEA and is the subject of an EU One Health Action Plan, according to the European Commission. Whether capture technology reduces resistance in practice has not been shown in any public study.

The Verdict

Aquila Bioscience and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.