EIC Accelerator Check: Ilya Pharma and Its Wound-Healing Bacteria

Ilya Pharma turns a probiotic bacterium into a small drug factory. The Uppsala company engineers Limosilactobacillus reuteri, a lactic acid bacterium, to produce CXCL12, a human signalling protein involved in tissue repair, and puts the bacteria directly on a wound. In March 2020 the EIC Accelerator pilot selected its project WHILYAS-2, listed by the European Commission as grant only, to run a phase 2a trial of the drug, ILP100-Topical, in people with diabetes and non-healing wounds. The EU contributed €1,360,362 to a €1,943,500 project, according to CORDIS.

The trial opened in September 2022 with 30 patients planned, Labiotech reported. It was terminated in December 2024 with one patient enrolled, citing "patient recruitment issues", according to ClinicalTrials.gov; the EU Clinical Trials Register lists the Swedish trial as "Prematurely Ended". The company is still operating, with the EIC Fund among its shareholders.

Who the Company Is

The Commission's list of the March and May 2020 winners names "ILYA PHARMA AB" of Uppsala as the only beneficiary of WHILYAS-2, "Wound healing ILYA-style 2". CORDIS gives the same name as coordinator and describes it as "a Swedish spin-out biotech company from Uppsala". The Swedish company register, as shown by Ratsit and North Data, records Ilya Pharma AB (publ), organisation number 559062-6015, in Uppsala, with the stated purpose of developing uses of genetically modified lactic acid bacteria. Ratsit shows the company as active, last checked on 14 October 2026, and the name with the "publ" suffix, which marks a company allowed to offer shares to the public, was registered on 13 June 2022.

Where Ilya Pharma Stands Now

Ilya is a small, active drug developer. It filed accounts for 2025, held an annual general meeting on 15 June 2026 and presented at conferences in the summer of 2026, according to its news page. Its website now describes it as "developing local-acting immunotherapies" and puts two uses of ILP100 first: an oral form for colitis caused by checkpoint inhibitor cancer drugs, with a phase 1/2a trial planned, and the topical form for skin wounds in SAVI, a rare inflammatory disease of children. Diabetic foot ulcers, the indication the EIC paid to test, are no longer the headline.

The SAVI move rests on a US designation. In September 2024 the FDA granted the topical drug, now named emilimogene sigulactibac, a Rare Pediatric Disease Designation for skin wounds in SAVI, according to Healio and Nordic Life Science. The designation can lead to a priority review voucher only if the drug is approved for SAVI. No SAVI trial is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, where the diabetic foot ulcer study is the only trial with Ilya Pharma as sponsor.

The Technology: Bacteria That Deliver a Healing Signal

Standard care for chronic wounds is cleaning, dressings, offloading pressure and, when infected, antibiotics. Growth factors applied to wounds break down quickly. Ilya's approach is to let living bacteria keep making the protein in the wound: the bacteria are freeze-dried and revived with water just before use, then act as "small local bioreactors", in the words of the first project's CORDIS summary. The idea came from research in immunophysiology and microbiology at Uppsala University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

The first human data came from SITU-SAFE, a phase 1 trial in 36 healthy volunteers with small wounds made on the upper arm. In the paper in eClinicalMedicine (2023), 76% of wounds treated with ILP100 had healed on day 32 against 59% of placebo wounds in the pooled multi-dose groups, and time to first registered healing was shorter by 6 days on average and by 10 days at the highest dose. The authors call these post-hoc analyses, and the safety endpoints were the primary ones. A 2021 report by Drug Discovery World gave the highest-dose gain as 11 days, one day more than the published paper. Six of the paper's authors, including the chief executive, are named as shareholders of Ilya Pharma.

What WHILYAS-2 Promised, and What the Record Shows

WHILYAS-2 was Ilya's second EU grant. The first, WHILYAS, was a Horizon 2020 SME Instrument project that ran from March 2018 to August 2019 with €2,992,575 of EU funding; its final report lists a large-animal toxicity study, a GMP cell bank and a first GMP batch. WHILYAS-2 ran from 1 October 2020 to 31 December 2023. Its single project objective on CORDIS was to "conduct a randomised controlled clinical phase 2a study in patients with diabetes and a non healing wound", to reach clinical proof of concept and make the company "further investable" or able to license the drug to a partner.

The funding type is reported two ways. The Commission's list and the worklist for this series record the award as grant only. Ilya announced on 8 June 2020 that it had been awarded €5.3 million of "blended financing", and in January 2021 that it was approved for equity by the EIC Fund after due diligence by the European Investment Bank. The €5.3 million is €3.94 million more than the EU grant on CORDIS; no source splits it into grant and equity.

The project's final periodic report, covering 2022 and 2023, says the clinical trial application was approved, sites were selected and trained, and "a number of protocol amendments" were made to fit "the actual patient population" of diabetic foot ulcer patients in Sweden. It reports no patient numbers and no results. The trial records fill the gap: the study at Skåne University Hospital in Lund and Uppsala University Hospital started on 26 September 2022 and ended on 20 December 2024, one year after the EIC project, with one patient enrolled. No result has been posted, and Ilya has not announced the termination on its news page.

1. Trial approval and site set-upDeliveredSwedish approval in July 2021, per DDW; sites trained, per CORDIS.
2. Randomised phase 2a trial in 30 patientsNot deliveredOne patient enrolled; terminated December 2024 for recruitment issues.
3. Clinical proof of concept in diabetic woundsNot deliveredNo efficacy data published or announced.
4. Become investable for VCs or a partnerPartly€8.5M in 2022 and €5M in 2024 with the EIC Fund; no licensing partner announced.
5. Fewer infections, lower cost per woundNot deliveredNo patient data exist to test the claims.

What Ilya Has Achieved Since the Award

The private money came, with the EIC Fund in it. Ilya closed €8.5 million in March 2022 with the EIC Fund and "an international consortium of family offices and private investors", reported by Nordic Life Science and Börsvärlden, which quoted the chief executive saying the company had started preparing a stock market listing for 2024. No listing has followed. In August 2024 it closed a further €5 million, mainly from existing shareholders including the EIC Fund, with six new shareholders, per Nordic Life Science. Ilya Pharma AB appears in the EIC Fund's official list of invested companies; the amount the fund invested is not public.

In April 2022 Ilya bought Nordic BioAnalysis, a bioanalysis services firm it had worked with for about five years, to secure its supply chain; the terms were not disclosed, according to Nordic Life Science and Drug Discovery World. The two disagree on when the target was founded, 2010 and 2019 respectively. In May 2022 the FDA cleared an investigational new drug application for a 260-patient phase 2 trial in surgical wounds of people with prediabetes, diabetes or obesity, with the first patient targeted for the third quarter of 2022, according to Nordic Life Science. That trial does not appear on ClinicalTrials.gov, and no start has been announced. The company also lists a pre-IND meeting with the FDA in March 2023 for the oral form.

Ilya also takes part in B-ACTIVE, an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network running from January 2024 to December 2027, with a net EU contribution of €293,709.60 to the company, according to CORDIS.

The Accounts

The filed accounts, as shown by Hitta (with Dun & Bradstreet) and Ratsit, show a net loss of SEK 14.9 million in 2023, a profit of SEK 1.2 million in 2024 and a loss of SEK 4.9 million in 2025. Equity rose from SEK 10.6 million to SEK 23.1 million over those three years. In 2024 fixed assets grew from SEK 25.3 million to SEK 41.3 million. Ratsit adds losses of SEK 58.3 million for 2021 and SEK 45.6 million for 2022, which no second source could confirm.

The two sources disagree on revenue and on staff. Hitta gives turnover of SEK 15.6 million in 2023 and SEK 21.7 million in 2024, while Ratsit gives SEK 2.0 million and SEK 3.4 million; both show SEK 10.3 million for 2025. Hitta reports 20 employees in 2023, Ratsit none; Ratsit gives 16 for 2021 and 18 for 2022, and both give 6 for 2024 and 2025. Whatever the 2023 figure, the company runs today with a third of the staff it had in 2022.

Why Europe Should Care

Antimicrobial resistance causes more than 35,000 deaths a year in the EU and EEA, according to the European Commission, and the Council's June 2023 recommendation extends the EU's 2017 One Health action plan against it. Infected diabetic wounds are one of the places where antibiotics are overused, and WHILYAS-2's reporting framed the drug as a way to limit their use. A wound treatment that heals faster and fights bacteria locally would fit that agenda. It has not yet been shown in the patients it was meant for.

The Verdict

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