Cysbio Says Its EIC Accelerator Amino Acids Sell in Asia

Serine and cysteine are amino acids used in food, animal feed, cosmetics and medicines, and the way both are made limits their use, according to the EU project that funded Cysbio. Cysbio, a 2019 spin-out of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), engineered E. coli bacteria to make serine from sugar and then convert it into cysteine. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal cut-off of May 2020 it won an EU grant of €2,061,714.20 for BioBAA, a €2,945,306 project to take that platform to market.

The project's final report on CORDIS says that "all main targets have been achieved", that one of the two amino acids has been "produced and already now sold in Asia" since 2023, and that both would launch in Europe in 2024. No European or US launch has been announced by Cysbio or anyone else since. The company's filed accounts show six years of losses, negative equity since the end of 2024, and a first small profit of DKK 124,708 in 2025, according to its 2025 annual report filed with the Danish Business Authority.

Where Cysbio Stands in 2026

Cysbio is still operating. It filed its 2025 accounts on 2 July 2026, according to the Danish Business Authority's filing index and North Data, and in September 2026 it advertised for a downstream purification scientist to set up purification of "several different biochemicals" and to work with "pilot and commercial production partners for tech transfer". The advert describes the company as "a team of mainly engineers and scientists" designing cell factories "to produce biochemicals at an industrial scale".

The leadership has changed. Co-founder Henrik Meyer, chief executive at the 2019 seed round and during the EU projects, left the executive board and the board of directors in February 2025, and co-founder and DTU professor Alex Toftgaard Nielsen became the registered director, according to North Data. The company's management page now lists Nielsen as CEO and CSO, alongside the two research directors who co-founded the company. The 2024 and 2025 annual reports name Nielsen, Christian Bille Jendresen and Xu Chaofeng as the board.

The company does not publish news on its website, and searches found no press coverage of Cysbio after 2021. What it sells, to whom, and under which brand is not public. In July 2024 it registered the word mark "AZMOS", according to North Data and the IP database IPqwery; neither source says what the mark is for.

The Technology: Amino Acids From Sugar

Cysbio's process designs bacterial cell factories that turn glucose, maltose or glycerol into serine, then converts serine into cysteine, according to the CORDIS project objective. The objective set out to replace "fossil-based, energy consuming and polluting processes" and to open a new market: replacing part of the methionine added to chicken feed with cheap cysteine, a market it put at 5.4 billion. The company's patent filings, listed by IPqwery and North Data, include genetically modified host cells that produce L-serine, the production of cysteine or cystine from serine in the fermentation medium, and a 2024 application for "a low dose formulation of L-serine for liver health and fatty liver diseases".

The second leg of the business is sulfation: microbes engineered to attach sulfate groups to phenolic compounds, which the company says can make drugs more soluble or produce new molecules, according to its technology page. Its lead product here is zosteric acid, which the company calls "eelgrass acid" according to Nordic Life Science, as a non-toxic antifouling agent for paints and sealants. In July 2021 Cysbio said its technology had been in development for about ten years and that "the first amino acids and sulfated products" would reach the market soon, according to Renewable Carbon News, which reprinted the company's press release.

What BioBAA Promised, and What the Record Shows

The European Commission's list of the May 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot winners names Cysbio, spelled "CYSBIO" in "Horscholm", as the sole company in the BioBAA project, with grant-only funding. CORDIS confirms Cysbio as the only participant. The grant agreement was signed on 12 November 2020 and the project ran from 1 December 2020 to 31 May 2023 under the Green Deal topic of the EIC Accelerator pilot. When Cysbio announced the grant in February 2021 it described a 24-month project in 2021 and 2022, according to Nordic Life Science; CORDIS lists 30 months. Whether the project was extended could not be verified.

The final report, covering December 2021 to May 2023, is upbeat. It says strain productivity reached the planned titer and yield, that one amino acid was shown to replace other feed additives "with no negative impact on growth and health for the animals", and that clinical trials of the other as a supplement for a lifestyle disease affecting "20 % of all people on the planet" were "concluded positively". It concedes that "a few elements were delayed and/or achieved by other means (like REACH and LCA)". It projects sales "above 50MEUR by 2029". None of these results has been published outside the report: no customer, product name, trial registration, trial result or REACH registration by Cysbio was found.

1. Production strains at target costDeliveredReported met in the final report; serine strain patents filed. No independent data.
2. Feed additive documentationDeliveredReported in the final report only.
3. Clinical data for a supplementPartialTrials reported positive; a 2024 patent application on L-serine for fatty liver exists, but no trial was published.
4. First amino acid sold in Asia, 2023PartialClaimed by Cysbio; no buyer, product or volume named.
5. Launch of both in Europe, 2024Not deliveredNo launch announced by October 2026.
6. REACH for both before EU launchNot deliveredNo registration announced.
7. Sales above €50M by 2029OpenDue in 2029; 2025 gross profit was DKK 9.93M.

The Asian sales claim has one indirect echo. Zhejiang NHU, Cysbio's Chinese investor, showed L-serine, cystine and L-cysteine "produced through bio-fermentation" at Food Ingredients China in March 2024, according to an NHU news item. NHU does not mention Cysbio, so whether those products use Cysbio's strains could not be verified.

The Money

Cysbio was funded by one investor and the EU. Zhejiang NHU, a stock-listed Chinese chemicals group, agreed a €5.5 million seed investment in March 2019, according to BioSpace and Nordic Life Science. The accounts show paid-in share capital and premium of DKK 22.4 million in 2019 and a further DKK 18.5 million in 2020, which the 2020 annual report attributes to "additional investment from the company's Chinese investor NHU". Together that is DKK 40.87 million, close to €5.5 million at the exchange rate of the time. North Data lists NHU (Hong Kong) Trading Company Ltd. and three founders' holding companies as shareholders in October 2020. The 2024 and 2025 auditor's reports are addressed to "the shareholder", in the singular, where earlier ones addressed "the shareholders"; the current ownership could not be verified because North Data shows it only to paying subscribers.

The losses added up to DKK 49.66 million by the end of 2025, more than the paid-in capital. Equity fell to DKK -8.92 million at the end of 2024, and the 2024 annual report notes that the company is therefore subject to the capital loss rule of the Danish Companies Act and that "the management is aware of this". No capital increase has been registered since October 2020, according to North Data. The 2025 profit of DKK 124,708 left equity at DKK -8.79 million.

Public money did not stop with BioBAA. Cysbio coordinated ZABIO, a Fast Track to Innovation project for bio-based zosteric acid with the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant in Ghent and Henkel, which ran from October 2020 to March 2023 with an EU contribution of €1,225,807.45 for Cysbio, according to CORDIS. Its final report says fermentation was scaled to 15 cubic metres "with lower performance and therefore lower end titer than in the smaller scales", and expected production in 2024; no product launch has been announced. The "€4.4 million" of EU funding Cysbio announced in 2021 matches the BioBAA grant plus the whole ZABIO grant of €2,420,962.58, including the partners' shares. North Data also records Danish state aid of DKK 1,242,000 for an industrial postdoc in June 2024 and DKK 2,971,655 under Innovation Fund Denmark's Grand Solutions programme in December 2024; the projects behind them could not be verified elsewhere.

Cysbio is not in the EIC Fund portfolio: none of the list's 16 pages, checked on 15 October 2026, names it. That fits the award, which was grant only.

Why Europe Should Care

On 20 March 2024 the Commission called biotechnology and biomanufacturing "one of the most promising technological areas of this century" and listed the barriers holding the EU back, including the transfer of research to the market, access to finance and value chain obstacles, in its communication on boosting biotechnology and biomanufacturing, summarised by SwissCore. Cysbio fits that brief closely: a university spin-out with patented strains that make commodity chemicals from sugar instead of fossil inputs.

It also illustrates the problem the communication describes. The only outside investor on record is a Chinese chemicals group that itself markets fermentation-made serine and cysteine, and the report's one claimed market so far is Asia. Seven years after the spin-out, there is no public evidence of production in Europe or of a European customer. Whether the EU-funded know-how ends up making amino acids in Europe or in China cannot be determined from public records.

The Verdict

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