Did the EIC Accelerator Pay Off for InterAx's GPCR Drug Discovery?

Between 30% and 40% of approved drugs act on one family of proteins, the G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), and more than 70% of the members that matter for medicine have no drug yet. Those are InterAx's own figures, and they vary: its 2021 announcement says "more than 30%" of approved drugs, its CORDIS summary says 40%. InterAx Biotech, a 2016 spin-off of ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute, set out to change the odds with a platform that combines laboratory assays, mathematical models of cell signalling and machine learning to predict how a molecule will behave inside a cell before it is tested in animals. At the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected its PICARD project and granted it an EU contribution of €1,745,217.25 towards a total cost of €2,493,167.50, according to CORDIS.

The project ran from 1 October 2019 to 31 May 2021, and the company's final report says "all milestones and deliverables were met or overreached". What the grant was meant to start, a service business selling the platform to pharma companies on the way to €940 million of market share within seven years, did not happen in that form. InterAx turned the platform on its own drug programmes instead. In January 2026 it signed a research and licensing deal for an obesity candidate with the US company Alveus Therapeutics, according to InterAx and Pharmaceutical Technology. None of its candidates has been announced as entering clinical trials.

Where InterAx Stands Now

InterAx is an active company. The Swiss commercial register lists it as existing, with its latest entry, a change to its articles of association adopted on 30 June 2026, published on 9 July 2026, according to Zefix. In July 2025 it moved its registered seat from Villigen, home of the PARK innovAARE campus next to the Paul Scherrer Institute, to Schlieren near Zurich, according to the same register and North Data.

Its most recent business news is the Alveus agreement of January 2026. The two companies will jointly research a small-molecule candidate for metabolic disease "to deliver durable weight loss with superior tolerability"; InterAx receives an upfront payment and is eligible for development, regulatory and commercial milestones, and none of the amounts are public, according to InterAx and Pharmaceutical Technology. The latter describes a three-asset portfolio: the partnered metabolic programme, an ACKR3 immuno-oncology programme and a GLP-1 metabolic asset.

Leadership has turned over repeatedly. Aurélien Rizk, a co-founder, was chief executive in September 2022, according to Venturelab, and was quoted as chief scientific officer in February 2024, according to InterAx. Chris Prior was chief executive in November 2023, according to an InterAx release carried by Webdisclosure, and left the board in July 2025, according to the register. Andrew Roberts, formerly chief portfolio officer at Alvotech, took over as chief executive in October 2025, according to InterAx; Pharmaceutical Technology quotes him in that role in January 2026.

The Technology: Reading the Signal Behind the Binding

Classic drug screening ranks thousands of molecules by how strongly they bind a target and how much they switch it on or off in a simple assay. A GPCR, however, can trigger several signalling pathways inside the cell at once, and a molecule that binds well may activate the pathway linked to side effects as much as the one linked to the therapeutic effect. InterAx measures those pathways in its own cell-based assays (PIC-Say), fits them to mathematical models of the signalling network (PIC-Sys) and, since the EIC project, uses machine learning (PIC-VisAI) to predict the signalling profile of molecules before they are synthesised, according to the PICARD final report. The company now markets the same approach as its "Deep Signal" platform, according to its website.

The pitch to the EIC was that this "systems biology" layer gives in vivo predictability that pure binding assays, structure-based design and virtual screening lack, reducing animal testing by 60 to 80% and raising the chance that a candidate survives clinical trials, according to the CORDIS objective. Those figures are the company's own projections. No independent study has measured them, and no InterAx-designed molecule has yet produced human data that could test them.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

PICARD had a predecessor. In July 2018 InterAx won a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 grant for a four-month feasibility study of the same platform, which concluded that the project was "not only feasible, but highly profitable", according to CORDIS and its Phase 1 report. The Phase 2 project followed in the 5 June 2019 round. The Commission's list of selected companies names InterAx in Villigen as the only beneficiary of PICARD; the run-together name "INTERAX BIOTECHSA INTERAX BIOTECH LT" found in some spreadsheets of that list is an artefact of the PDF table, which merges the company's French and English names (InterAx Biotech SA, InterAx Biotech Ltd) with the neighbouring row. The grant agreement was signed on 20 September 2019.

The final report, covering October 2020 to May 2021, lists three milestones. The machine learning model predicted five signalling parameters of the beta-2 adrenergic receptor for new molecules before they were made, with "an average 69% and maximum 85% prediction accuracy". The company gave more than 60 presentations at seven partnering conferences, opened more than ten negotiations and launched three pilot projects. And three external customer projects plus a fourth in-house drug discovery project were run on the platform. Named paying customers during the project included Lundbeck, Boehringer Ingelheim and GPCR Therapeutics, according to the report; InterAx had announced the Lundbeck and Boehringer Ingelheim agreements in April and August 2019 and the GPCR Therapeutics collaboration in December 2019.

On timing, the sources do not match. InterAx said in September 2021 that it completed PICARD on 31 May 2021, "four months in advance to the deadline", according to its announcement. CORDIS gives 31 May 2021 as the project's end date, not an earlier finish against a later one. Whether the contractual end date was moved forward could not be verified.

1. Extend assays and models to more GPCR targetsDeliveredSeveral additional GPCRs, per the final report.
2. AI layer that predicts signalling before synthesisDelivered69% average, 85% maximum accuracy on one receptor; self-reported.
3. Pilot projects with pharma customersDeliveredThree pilots; Lundbeck, Boehringer Ingelheim and GPCR Therapeutics named.
4. Long-term platform partnerships, 1 to 2% of a €71.2B market (€940M) in seven yearsNot achievedNo revenue is public; the model shifted to own drug programmes.
5. Finish ahead of scheduleUnverifiedCompany claims four months early; CORDIS end date is the same day.

What Came After the Grant

The in-house programme that PICARD had started, aimed at a chemokine receptor linked to cancer, inflammation and neurological disease and initially at triple negative breast cancer, according to the final report, became the company's centre of gravity. In November 2023 InterAx said new funds would take "two lead programs in cancer and inflammation towards IND", the filing needed to start trials in the United States, according to its release. In February 2024 it reported that the lead compound of its IAX25 series restored cytokine levels inside tumours and drew in immune cells in a way that "correlates with tumor regression in preclinical studies", and that a potential oral alternative to the obesity drug tirzepatide was showing promising results, according to InterAx, Venture Kick and the Paul Scherrer Institute. No peer-reviewed data on these compounds and no IND filing or trial start have been announced since.

Other partnerships came from the platform side. InterAx announced a target validation collaboration with Sosei Heptares in May 2023 and a remyelination research project with the MS Center Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in July 2022, according to its news page; no results of either have been published by the company.

More EU money, through Swiss channels

InterAx kept drawing on European research programmes. It was a partner in ONCORNET2.0, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie training network on oncogenic GPCR networks coordinated by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with a net EU contribution of €281,276.64 from February 2020 to January 2024, according to CORDIS. In November 2023 it joined UniSens, an EIC Pathfinder project coordinated by Isar Bioscience to build a universal GPCR activity sensor. CORDIS lists InterAx there as a partner with a net EU contribution of €0 and puts the EU contribution for the whole project at €2,965,384.75, according to CORDIS. InterAx gave a total volume of €3.7 million and said it had secured "more than 700k", according to its announcement. The difference fits Switzerland's status: as a non-associated country for Horizon Europe calls from 2021 to 2024, its participants are funded by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) rather than the EU, according to SERI and the University of Fribourg.

The Money

InterAx publishes no accounts, and none are available through the commercial register, so its revenue, losses and cash are not public. The register does show how it was financed. In January 2019, five months before the EIC selection, it closed a CHF 3 million round led by Falcon III Ventures and investiere, according to the Swiss Biotech Association and InterAx; the register shows 672,604 new preferred A shares issued that month. By September 2022 the company said it had raised CHF 5 million in total and employed 11 people, according to Venturelab. Data providers disagree with that total: CB Insights counts $3.94 million raised.

The two capital increases of 2024 were paid almost entirely by converting debt. In February 2024 the company set off claims of CHF 443,586 against 68,244 new preferred A shares, and in December 2024 claims of CHF 3,121,378 against 480,212 more, according to entries in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce shown on Zefix. Both work out at CHF 6.50 per share. Who held those claims is not public. Nominal share capital rose to CHF 306,713.50, and in June 2026 shareholders renewed a capital band that lets the board issue more shares, according to the same register. No new priced equity round has been announced since 2019, and the EIC Fund's list of invested companies does not include InterAx; its 2019 award was a grant only.

Why It Matters for Europe

The European Commission's Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe, adopted on 25 November 2020, aims to support the "competitiveness, innovation and sustainability" of the EU's pharmaceutical industry and to address unmet medical needs. Discovery tools that cut failure rates before clinical trials sit squarely in that aim, and the PICARD pitch also promised fewer animal studies. So far the clearest commercial result is a licensing deal for a metabolic candidate with Alveus Therapeutics, which has its headquarters in Philadelphia and research operations in Copenhagen, according to InterAx.

The Verdict

A grant funds development, not market success, and on that measure the EU's €1.75 million bought what was promised. Whether it paid off depends on a question the public record cannot yet answer: whether a molecule designed on the platform reaches and survives clinical trials. InterAx and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article, which is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.