Bioinicia: EIC Accelerator Grant for Encapsulation, What Came Next

Omega-3 oils, probiotics and many vitamins break down when they are heated, and most industrial encapsulation methods, spray drying above all, use heat. Bioinicia, a company in Paterna near Valencia that grew out of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), offered a way around that: an electrically charged spray that dries and coats the ingredient in one step at room temperature. In the EU's April 2019 round of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, it won a grant to take that process from a 1-tonne-a-year prototype to a 10-tonne-a-year demonstration plant, according to CORDIS.

The project, CAPSULTEK, ran from 1 August 2019 to 31 July 2022 with an EU contribution of €689,543.75 towards a total cost of €985,062.50. Bioinicia was its only beneficiary; the Commission's list for the round names no partner company. Bioinicia's own history page says it added an industrial particle plant in 2020 and had it certified to pharmaceutical good manufacturing practice (GMP) in 2023. What the record does not show is the commercial half of the plan: a food or infant formula maker buying encapsulated omega-3 from Bioinicia.

What Bioinicia Does Today

Bioinicia is active. Its website lists three lines of business: contract development and GMP manufacturing of electrospun fibres and particles for pharmaceutical, cosmetic and nutraceutical clients; Fluidnatek electrospinning and electrospraying machines; and filter media. Its latest news item, dated 27 October 2025, says it manufactures the Rivelin patch for the Danish drug developer Dermtreat, a two-layer electrospun patch that delivers a steroid to lesions in the mouth, according to Bioinicia. The patch itself and its electrospun design are described independently by The Engineer; Dermtreat's €16.2 million funding round, which the Bioinicia post calls recent, was announced in May 2017, according to European Biotechnology. No independent source names Bioinicia as the manufacturer.

The company register shows a business still being reorganised. In October 2021 Bioinicia SL hived off parts of its business into Bioinicia Proveil SL and Bioinicia Fluidnatek SL; in June 2026 it changed its registered address within Paterna, and in late 2025 and early 2026 it changed a board representative and its articles, according to Empresia and Infonif. Bioinicia Proveil SL was renamed Bioinicia Fiber Manufacturing SL in February 2025, and in April 2024 Lars Markwort, who signed as Bioinicia's chief executive in a March 2020 letter, left that company's board in favour of Voyage Investment GmbH, which he represents on the board of the Fluidnatek company, according to Infonif's records for Bioinicia Fiber Manufacturing and Bioinicia Fluidnatek.

Staff and profit figures could not be verified. Empresia puts Bioinicia SL's annual sales above €2.5 million without naming the year; Infonif estimates about two employees for the same company. Both hide the filed accounts behind a paywall, and the 2021 split means the figures for Bioinicia SL no longer cover the whole group.

The Technology: Spraying Instead of Heating

The process is called electrospraying assisted by pressurised gas (EAPG). A liquid containing the ingredient and a coating material, such as whey protein, is atomised by compressed air inside a strong electric field. The charged droplets shrink as the solvent evaporates at room temperature, and the result is collected as a dry, free-flowing powder. The CORDIS report describes it as a technology that can "microencapsulate and simultaneously dry active ingredients at room temperature, in a single-step". Spray drying, the industry standard, exposes the ingredient to hot air; freeze drying avoids heat but is slow and energy-hungry.

The scientific basis is published. In a 2020 paper in Nanomaterials, CSIC researchers Cristina Prieto and José María Lagarón encapsulated algae oil rich in DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid, in particles of about 5 micrometres, and reported peroxide values under 5 meq/kg, meaning the oil was not oxidised by the process. CORDIS lists the paper and a second one on beta-carotene as results of the project, and Bioinicia presented the first one in a February 2020 post. The process is protected by a US patent, US11253833B2, granted in February 2022 with a priority date of 30 December 2016; the related European application, EP3563930A1, was still pending, according to Google Patents.

What CAPSULTEK Promised, and What the Record Shows

The plan in the CORDIS objective was specific: build an industrial demonstration plant of 10 tonnes a year, optimise the process for omega-3 and probiotics, cut encapsulation costs by 40% and raise the concentration of active ingredients by 50%. The first market was to be infant formula. Bioinicia said "first-line food companies" had stated their interest and forecast a profit of €8 million by the fifth year of sales.

The only report on the CORDIS reporting page is labelled as the third period, August 2021 to July 2022, but its text describes the first year: the plant had been designed and was "being building at this moment (August 2020)", with operation planned from 30 September 2020, and Covid-19 had cancelled the trade fairs where the company planned to sell. No account of the plant's commissioning, test runs or customer trials is published, and the results page lists four deliverables on technology watch and communication and the two papers. The company's own history page states that two industrial plants were added in 2020, one with "annual production capacity of 20 tons of dry particles", and that the "EAPG particle plant" won GMP certification in 2023. Neither claim appears in an independent source.

1. 10-tonne demonstration plantCompany claimCORDIS shows it under construction in August 2020; Bioinicia claims a 20-tonne plant, GMP-certified in 2023.
2. Omega-3 encapsulation validatedDeliveredDHA algae oil encapsulated without oxidation, Nanomaterials 2020, listed on CORDIS.
3. Probiotics optimisedNot shownNo probiotics result appears in the CORDIS report or results.
4. Infant formula and food customersNot achievedNo customer announced by the company or a third party.
5. €8 million profit by year fiveNot achievedNo sales of the technology are public; Bioinicia SL's sales bracket is above €2.5 million in total.

On the plan's own terms, CAPSULTEK is partly delivered. The science works and has been published, and the company says the plant exists. The market launch, which was the purpose of a Phase 2 grant, has no public evidence four years after the project ended. Bioinicia's nutraceuticals page still offers CAPSULTEK as a contract development and manufacturing service, and lists "technology market validation with omega-3 oils" and "process certification" as steps, without naming a client or product.

What Happened Instead: Masks, Fibres and More EU Projects

A few months into CAPSULTEK, Covid-19 changed the company's priorities. Bioinicia turned its pharmaceutical facility over to PROVEIL, a nanofibre filter material for masks, which it said could supply "up to 7 million face masks per month", according to Medical Technology. The first half million FFP2 masks using the filter reached the Spanish market, with sales in Germany and Latin America planned, according to the CSIC food technology institute IATA. The Spanish press covered further masks, including transparent ones for lip reading, in 2021.

EU money kept coming, mostly through consortium projects. CORDIS lists Bioinicia SL in REBORN, a Horizon Europe project running to December 2026 on electrospun patches to regenerate heart tissue after infarction, with a net EU contribution of €305,670 to Bioinicia, according to CORDIS. Earlier it received €539,875 in OptiNanoPro and €276,355.11 in USABLE PACKAGING. Its website also lists a regional project on biodegradable elastomers, ELASTOTEX, with €156,309.60 of support ending in September 2024, and 2G-PROVEIL, an EU4Health project on reusable smart masks that started on 1 April 2025 with a requested EU contribution of €4,115,704.30 across four Spanish partners, according to Bioinicia. The 2G-PROVEIL figures could not be checked in an EU database for this article.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's March 2024 Communication "Building the future with nature: Boosting Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing in the EU" names the transfer of research results to market, access to finance and value-chain obstacles as the sector's main barriers, according to ERA Portal Austria and Hogan Lovells. CAPSULTEK sits exactly on that gap: a publicly funded laboratory method that a CSIC spin-off scaled with EU money. The CORDIS report argues that omega-3 intake in Europe is below the recommended 250 mg a day and that most functional food value chains are led by Kellogg, Nestlé and PepsiCo. A European, heat-free encapsulation process would let smaller ingredient suppliers compete on quality; whether it does so depends on a customer that has not yet been named.

The Verdict

Bioinicia has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.