Why Positrigo's EIC Accelerator Brain PET Scanner Reached Clinics

A PET scan is the most direct way to see the amyloid plaques of Alzheimer's disease in a living brain, but the scanners that do it are whole-body machines that fill a shielded room and are combined with a CT or MRI. Positrigo, a 2018 spin-off of ETH Zurich's Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics, built a PET scanner only for the head, which patients use sitting up. In the European Innovation Council's January 2020 cut-off it was selected for blended finance under the Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot, and CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,246,666.80 towards a €3,209,524 project, NeuroLF, that ran from 1 April 2020 to 30 September 2022.

The project's goal was a device "ready to receive the CE mark and FDA 510k clearance" by its end, according to the closing report. Neither clearance arrived during the project. Both came in 2024, and by the autumn of 2026 NeuroLF was installed or on order at neurology practices in California and Florida and at university hospitals in Munich and Genoa. This is the story of a hardware start-up that delivered what it promised the EIC, late, and then found a market that new Alzheimer's drugs had created in the meantime.

Where Positrigo Stands Now

Positrigo is active and selling. The Zurich commercial register lists Positrigo AG as existing, with its seat at Technoparkstrasse 1 and its last entry published on 21 October 2025, according to Zefix, the federal index of Swiss commercial registers; Moneyhouse shows the same status and the same October 2025 capital increase. In September 2026 Germany's research minister, Dorothee Bär, was shown NeuroLF at LMU Klinikum Munich on World Alzheimer's Day, according to Positrigo. A month earlier the company said a sponsor had accepted NeuroLF as the imaging platform for a Phase 2 study at LMU Munich in early-stage Alzheimer's disease associated with Down syndrome, in an announcement that quotes Matthias Brendel, a professor of translational molecular imaging at the university (Positrigo, August 2026).

Neither Zefix nor Moneyhouse shows revenue, results or headcount for Positrigo, so its finances and staff numbers could not be verified. What is public is a run of named sales since mid-2025 and a commercial team built for them: a global chief commercial officer, Jerome Descheirder, appointed in September 2025, and a group CFO, Matthieu Cousteau, in October 2025. The register entry of 9 October 2025 adds Matthieu Cousteau as an authorised signatory, which matches it.

The Technology: A PET Scanner for the Head Only

PET imaging works by injecting a radioactive tracer that binds to a target, such as amyloid or tau protein or regions of high glucose use, and detecting the pairs of gamma rays released when its positrons annihilate. Hospital PET scanners are built as rings wide enough for the whole body, so most of their detector material sits far from the head when they image the brain. NeuroLF puts its detectors in an octagonal prism that sits close around the patient's head, and it has no CT or MRI attached, according to a 2022 proof-of-concept paper by Positrigo staff and researchers from University Hospital Zurich and University College London. Without a CT, the scanner has to estimate how much the skull and tissue absorb the signal; the paper reports that fitting a template brain scan gave images correlating 0.893 with the reference, against 0.908 when the patient's own CT was used.

The performance of the commercial NeuroLF Basic, with 10 mm lutetium yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO) crystals, was measured under the NEMA NU2 2018 standard in a paper published in Medical Physics in September 2026: spatial resolution of 2.51 mm at 1 cm from the centre, sensitivity of 5.85 counts per second per kilobecquerel at the centre, and a scatter fraction of 24.2%. Most authors are Positrigo employees, and the three Leipzig professors among them sit on its advisory board, the paper discloses. No independent head-to-head comparison with a whole-body scanner has been published; a clinical study comparing the two at the University of Leipzig Medical Center was launched in 2024, according to the company.

The first human images came from a prototype, BPET, which the founders built in Günther Dissertori's group at ETH Zurich. An exploratory study at University Hospital Zurich scanned 10 patients who had also had a whole-body PET/CT; 9 of the 10 preferred sitting to lying down, the company reported in July 2021. That same study is named in the EIC project's CORDIS report.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Positrigo had already won a €50,000 EIC SME Instrument Phase 1 grant for a feasibility study of the prototype, BPET, from February to May 2019, according to CORDIS. CORDIS files NeuroLF under the SME instrument phase 2 funding scheme, which the EIC Accelerator pilot used. The Commission's list of the January 2020 winners names Positrigo AG of Zurich as the only company on the project, with blended finance. The NeuroLF grant agreement was signed on 8 June 2020, more than two months after the project's official start, and CORDIS lists Positrigo as the sole participant.

The objective on CORDIS lays out the plan: a first prototype existed, in-house manufacturing had been set up and a regulatory roadmap defined, and the money was for "optimization, clinical validation and successful market launch". The closing report, covering April 2021 to September 2022, says an ISO 13485 quality system was set up, the ExploreBPET clinical study was done, the NeuroLF design was completed and its technical file was being submitted to the notified body TÜV Süd, with the CE mark expected in 2023. "First pre-sales contracts are in sight," it says. Only this second report is published; the first period has no public summary.

1. Turn the prototype into a medical deviceDeliveredDesign completed and ISO 13485 system in place by September 2022, per the CORDIS report.
2. Clinical validationDeliveredExploreBPET in Zurich during the project; a NeuroLF study in Leipzig from 2024 and NEMA results published in 2026.
3. Ready for CE mark and FDA 510(k) by project endLateFDA clearance on 15 July 2024 and CE mark in October 2024, about two years after the project closed.
4. Market launchDeliveredFirst US system installed in December 2024; named buyers in the US, Germany and Italy since July 2025.
5. Population-wide screening at a tenth of the costUnverifiedNo price, scan volume or cost study is public.

The FDA database shows that Positrigo filed 510(k) K241751 for NeuroLF Basic, Pro and Advanced and the NeuroLF Seat on 18 June 2024 and received a "substantially equivalent" decision on 15 July 2024. The company's own announcement dates the clearance 16 July 2024, and Medical Device Developments reported it on 17 July. The CE mark under the EU Medical Device Regulation was announced on 2 October 2024 by Positrigo and reported by Applied Radiology. The delay against the CORDIS plan is real, but every promised step has since been taken publicly, which is why this article rates the award as delivered.

The Money: Grant, Then EIC Fund Equity

The blended award had two parts. The grant is the one CORDIS shows. The equity came through the EIC Fund in its 2021 cycle: €1.5 million to top up the second tranche of Positrigo's Series A, plus a commitment to invest up to €3.5 million more in a future round, according to the company's July 2021 announcement. Technopark Zurich also reported the €1.5 million and called Positrigo one of the first companies to receive equity under the EIC Accelerator. Positrigo appears in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, and its portfolio page quotes Fischer: "First with the EIC Accelerator grant and now with the EIC Fund investment we could significantly accelerate our product development and attract private investors." Whether any of the further €3.5 million was invested is not public; the EIC Fund is named as an existing investor that took part in the 2022 Series B, with no amount given.

The private rounds followed. In October 2022 Positrigo raised CHF 5.5 million in a first close of a Series B led by Fairway Asset Management, with 4FO Venture Partners, the EIC Fund, Zürcher Kantonalbank and the ETH Foundation, bringing its total dilutive and non-dilutive funding to over CHF 13 million, according to Positrigo and Startupticker. The register shows that this capital increase, dated 3 October 2022, converted claims of CHF 499,999.58 and EUR 499,999.70 into shares. In June 2025 it closed an oversubscribed CHF 7 million round led by the venture firm HealthCap with Navivo, adding HealthCap's Max Odlander, Ajit Singh and Didier Deltort to its board, according to Positrigo and AuntMinnie, which put it at $8.5 million.

Switzerland's position in EU research changed along the way. In 2023 Positrigo was one of 53 projects funded by Innosuisse's Swiss Accelerator, which the Swiss government describes as a transitional measure for Horizon Europe; the company did not disclose the amount in its announcement.

The register entries track each round. Nominal share capital grew from CHF 100,200 at the conversion to an AG in February 2019 to CHF 556,850.67 after an increase on 10 October 2025, according to the SHAB publications listed on Zefix. The jump from CHF 341,019.37 to CHF 530,600.40 on 4 June 2025 matches the timing of the HealthCap round and created a new class of preferred C shares.

Customers Since Clearance

Positrigo's first system was "shipped and successfully installed shortly before year end in the US" in 2024, the company said, without naming the buyer. Since then it has named its customers. The Neuron Clinic in San Marcos, California, was the first US outpatient neurology practice to buy a NeuroLF, installed in October 2025, and in April 2026 it ordered two more for delivery in the third and fourth quarters, according to Positrigo and the release as carried by MedTech Dive. Beverly Hills Medical Imaging bought two systems in October 2025, and the Espinosa Neuroscience Institute in Florida one in May 2026. In Europe, LMU Hospital Munich bought one in August 2025 and the Ospedale Policlinico San Martino in Genoa in December 2025, through the Italian distributor Radius; distributors were also appointed in France and Spain.

Eight named systems is a start, not scale. In February 2026 Positrigo launched a "BrainPET Accelerator Program" with "operational and clinical support" for US neurology practices, according to its announcement, a sign that it is helping small practices that have never run a nuclear medicine service to start one.

Why Europe Should Care

The market Positrigo bet on in 2020 arrived. On 15 April 2025 the European Commission authorised lecanemab (Leqembi), the first EU medicine aimed at an underlying cause of Alzheimer's disease, for patients with "confirmed amyloid pathology", according to the European Medicines Agency. Positrigo cites a projection by the nuclear medicine community that demand for amyloid PET could rise 20-fold once such therapies are available in Europe, in its LMU announcement. In January 2026 the company joined ACCESS AD, a five-year EU Innovative Health Initiative project on Alzheimer's diagnosis and care with a total budget of €37,592,288, of which €20,190,282.35 is EU funding, according to CORDIS and Positrigo's announcement.

The Commission's 2021 SAMIRA action plan on medical uses of radiation sets out to ensure access to "high quality radiological and nuclear technologies in medicine" and to support their innovation, as summarised by the European American Chamber of Commerce. A dedicated brain scanner designed and certified in Zurich fits that aim and a niche that new drugs are expanding. Its first commercial traction, though, has been in the United States, where the company founded its subsidiary in 2023 and after the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it would reimburse amyloid PET, according to its announcement.

The Verdict

Positrigo has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public registers, EU and US regulatory records, scientific papers and company statements, linked throughout.