Did the EIC Accelerator Pay Off for LUMICKS' Cell Avidity Tool?

Cell therapies such as CAR-T only work if the engineered immune cells hold on to cancer cells long and hard enough to kill them, and until recently few laboratories could measure that grip directly. LUMICKS, a 2014 spin-off of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam best known for its C-Trap optical tweezers microscopes, built an instrument to do it: the z-Movi, which pulls immune cells off a layer of tumour cells with sound waves and records the force at which each one lets go.

In the March 2020 cut-off of the Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot, the European Commission selected LUMICKS B.V. for a grant-only award for the "z-Movi cell screening and sorting platform". The list names no other beneficiary for the project. According to CORDIS, the EU contributed €2,012,500 to a €2,875,000 project that ran from 1 October 2020 to 30 September 2022. The application promised "the first high-throughput platform that screens and sorts immune cells based on their functionality" and an incremental z-Movi revenue stream of "around €20M by 2022". Six years later the instrument is on the market and cited in research papers, but the money it was meant to earn is nowhere in the accounts.

Where LUMICKS Stands Now

LUMICKS is operating. The Dutch register data reported by Liza show LUMICKS Technologies B.V. as active with accounts filed for 2024, and LUMICKS B.V., the company named in the EIC list, as active too; LUMICKS B.V. last published its own balance sheet for 2019 and is now covered by the group filing under a so-called 403 declaration, according to its Liza entry. A web search for Dutch insolvency notices under the LUMICKS name returned none. The company's newest product, Avidion, a high-throughput cell avidity platform, had its European launch on 9 September 2025, according to a company release that was also distributed through PR Newswire. In April 2026 LUMICKS was still promoting conference posters by cell avidity users, including a Harvard Medical School study of CAR-T cells against pancreatic cancer.

The leadership has changed. On 29 May 2024 the company appointed Hugo de Wit, a former Sartorius manager who had run Cellca GmbH until its sale to Sartorius in 2015, as chief executive, replacing co-founder Olivier Heyning after ten years. LUMICKS' own history page says the Series D let it grow "to ~250 FTE" and describes the period since 2022 as one of "optimizing and efficiency"; it now speaks of a team "exceeding 150 people". The group accounts show what that meant: staff fell from 257 in 2022 to 158 in 2024.

The Technology: Measuring a Grip With Sound

Drug developers usually test immune cells in two ways: molecular binding assays, which measure how strongly a single receptor binds its target protein, and killing assays, which count dead tumour cells hours or days later. Cell avidity sits between them: it is the total binding strength between a whole immune cell and a whole target cell, the sum of all receptors and adhesion molecules involved.

In the z-Movi, target cells grow as a single layer inside a small chip. Fluorescently labelled effector cells, such as CAR-T or natural killer cells, are added and allowed to bind. The instrument then applies a rising acoustic force. As a 2020 webinar described the principle, effector cells "are pulled up and released from the target cell monolayer once the acoustic force exerted on them exceeds their binding avidity", according to Cambridge Healthtech Institute. A fluorescence camera tracks which cells detach at which force. The current product page lists up to 20 measurements a day, up to five sequential measurements on the same cell layer, and five reusable chips good for up to 125 runs each, and now positions the z-Movi for "small sized" studies.

Avidion, its successor, moves the same idea to disposable 48-well cartridges: up to four cartridges and 192 measurements a day, with robotic handling, up to 800 cells analysed per well and three fluorescence channels besides avidity, according to the Avidion product page. That is the throughput the EIC application described in 2020, delivered three years after the project ended.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

When LUMICKS applied, a first z-Movi had "already" been introduced to early adopters, the CORDIS objective says; the grant was to fund a new generation for research institutes, biotech and pharma. The investor Lauxera dates the z-Movi's release to 2020. The grant agreement was signed on 16 September 2020.

The money was split inside the group. CORDIS lists LUMICKS CA B.V. as coordinator with a net EU contribution of €1,284,500, and LUMICKS B.V., whose participation "ended", with €728,000. LUMICKS CA B.V. was only established on 19 March 2021, according to its Liza entry, after the project had started, so the coordinator role passed from LUMICKS B.V. to a new cell avidity subsidiary during the project. Liza shows no published accounts for LUMICKS CA B.V.

The final periodic report, covering October 2021 to September 2022, says the grant "has contributed to turning the first prototype into a full commercial product", paying for a fluorescence imaging module, improved fluidics, better acoustic chips, new software for instrument control and image analysis, and new assays. It reports eight scientific publications since the launch, and states that "many customers in industry and academia" use the technology daily. It names no customers and gives no sales figures.

1. Commercial z-Movi instrumentDeliveredOn sale since 2020, per Lauxera and the CORDIS report; placements at INmune Bio, Fred Hutch and Oxford announced.
2. Imaging, fluidics, chips and software upgradesDeliveredListed as completed in the final CORDIS report; fluorescence imaging is on the current product page.
3. High-throughput screeningLateThe z-Movi does up to 20 measurements a day; the 192-a-day Avidion launched in September 2025, three years after the project.
4. Sorting of immune cellsPartlyThe report says the technology can "separate cells based on binding strength", but neither product page offers recovery of sorted cells.
5. Incremental z-Movi revenue of about €20M by 2022Not achievedTurnover of the whole group, all products, was €17.9M in 2022.
6. Net profit margin to doubleNot achievedThe group lost €34.1M in 2022 and €9.9M in 2024.

The project delivered its engineering on time: the funded improvements exist and the instrument is sold. The commercial targets, written into the application, were not met. A €20 million revenue stream from one new instrument by 2022 was more than the entire group, including its established C-Trap business, turned over that year.

What LUMICKS Has Achieved Since the Award

Six months into the EIC project, LUMICKS closed a $93 million Series D led by Farallon Capital Management and Lauxera Capital Partners, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2, funds advised by T. Rowe Price and others, according to the company and Gilde Healthcare, which led the first round in 2017 and remained the largest shareholder. Both said most of the money would go to research and commercial work on the z-Movi. A month later, LUMICKS said it would voluntarily return $1.7 million of Dutch NOW wage support and $163,830 from the US Paycheck Protection Program received in 2020, when pandemic cutbacks at academic labs had hit its sales.

The z-Movi found named users. INmune Bio installed one in July 2021 to test whether its NK cell product raises the avidity of NK cells for tumour cells, according to the company; the release gives no price. In January 2022 the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and the University of Oxford took instruments. An Amsterdam UMC team used the z-Movi in a December 2021 Science Translational Medicine study on dual-targeting CAR-T cells for multiple myeloma, according to a LUMICKS release. By September 2025 the company said cell avidity had featured in "over 50 high-impact publications" from more than 70 institutions and companies. How many z-Movi units have been sold has never been published.

On 10 October 2024 the European Investment Bank signed €20 million of venture debt with LUMICKS under the InvestEU programme, to accelerate the launch of the next-generation, high-throughput cell avidity platform; Silicon Canals reported the same deal. That platform became Avidion. No new equity round since 2021 has been announced.

The Money

The figures below come from the annual accounts of LUMICKS Technologies B.V. filed with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, as reported by Liza; a second free source for them could not be found, and the KvK filings themselves are behind a paywall. They cover all of LUMICKS' products, so the z-Movi's share of sales cannot be isolated.

Turnover rose from €17.9 million in 2022 to €19.8 million in 2023 and €23.5 million in 2024, an increase of 31% over two years, and gross margin climbed from €11.5 million to €16.1 million. The net loss shrank from €34.1 million to €22.6 million and then €9.9 million. Much of the improvement came from cost cuts: employees fell from 257 to 158. Equity dropped from €48.2 million at the end of 2021 to €15.3 million at the end of 2024, while debts rose to €24.0 million in 2024, the year the EIB loan was signed.

For comparison, LUMICKS B.V. alone reported 64 employees and equity of €7.9 million for 2019, the last year it filed its own balance sheet, according to Liza. North Data lists EU and Dutch state aid for LUMICKS B.V. going back to 2015, including the €728,000 share of the z-Movi grant and Dutch innovation credits in 2018 and 2020.

Why Europe Should Care

On 2 July 2025 the Commission presented its first Strategy for European Life Sciences, which aims to "position Europe as the world's most attractive place for life sciences by 2030" and names cell and gene therapies among the targets of a planned Biotech Act. According to Van Bael & Bellis, it also plans funding for advanced therapy medicinal products and a European network of centres of excellence for them from 2026. Research instruments that help sort good CAR-T candidates from bad ones before costly trials sit early in that chain, and the EU has now backed LUMICKS twice, with the EIC grant and the InvestEU-supported EIB loan. Whether avidity becomes a standard step in cell therapy development, rather than a research technique, is still open: LUMICKS' own Avidion release cites a figure that 83% of CAR-T therapies fail after preclinical development, a problem its tools are meant to address but have not yet been shown to solve.

The Verdict

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