Remedy Biologics' EIC Accelerator COVID Antibody Hunt Under Review

In the first months of the pandemic, the European Innovation Council bet that a small Irish company could find the best antibodies in the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients faster than anyone else. Remedy Biologics Limited, which trades as RemedyBio, was selected in the March 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot for RapCo-19, a "Rapid COVID-19 Passive Therapy Response Platform", with blended finance, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies. The list gives the project one row and names no partner company. CORDIS records an EU grant of €2,500,000 towards a total cost of €4,500,000, from 1 September 2020 to 31 May 2022. In July 2021 the EIC Fund added €8 million of equity, completing a €10.5 million award, according to Dublin City University and The Irish Times.

The screen worked: the company's final report says it found virus-neutralising antibodies directly in patient immune cells and narrowed one patient's sample to 122 candidates. The next steps it promised, purified antibody, animal studies and handover to manufacturers, have not been published. More than four years after the project ended, RemedyBio's public work is about cancer.

Where RemedyBio Stands Now

The company is a going concern on the Irish register. The Companies Registration Office's company records show Remedy Biologics Limited with the status "Normal", no dissolution date, an annual return made up to 30 September 2025 and its next return due on 30 September 2026. The CRO's financial statements index lists accounts to 31 December 2024, received on 21 November 2025, after accounts to December 2022 and December 2023 in the previous two years. The figures inside those filings are not in the open data, so revenue, losses and headcount could not be verified for this article.

Public signs of activity are thinner. The company website carries a 2023 copyright line, a news section without articles and a placeholder address. It lists co-founder Dan Crowley, chief executive in all the 2020 and 2021 announcements, as executive chair, and Dr Rick Leach as managing director and chief science officer. Dr Paul Leonard, the DCU academic who developed the Nanoreactor and was named co-founder and chief scientific officer in 2020, is not listed. When and why the leadership changed has not been announced.

The latest company news found is from December 2022. The EIC Fund's portfolio page carries an undated quote from Crowley saying RemedyBio "continues to grow" and that its strategy "evolves to look at further opportunities around our Nanoreactor Technology and Searchlight Discovery Platform". The Searchlight platform is not described in any source found.

The Technology: Millions of Single Cells on One Array

When a person recovers from an infection, their B cells have produced thousands of different antibodies, of very uneven quality. The standard way to find the rare potent ones is to sort the cells, grow or clone them, and test each antibody in plates, then check separately whether it actually stops the virus. RemedyBio's Nanoreactor, the result of a research programme at DCU, puts millions of single immune cells into tiny compartments and reads each cell's antibody at the same time, the company told DCU and the Irish Examiner in June 2020.

The claimed edge is that binding, affinity ranking and neutralisation are measured in one 24-hour run. The final CORDIS report contrasts this with competing methods that test neutralisation "downstream with lengthy (days & weeks vs hours in Nanoreactor) and labour intensive procedures (10,000 microtitre plates vs 1 array in Nanoreactor)". These comparisons are the company's own; no independent benchmark or peer-reviewed paper on the RapCo-19 results was found.

What RapCo-19 Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project objective was a platform "to rapidly identify, produce and deliver anti-viral neutralising antibodies to COVID-19" as a passive therapy for critically ill patients. The results page lists the planned outputs: preclinical safety and efficacy data in rodent models, highly purified antibody for those studies, the DNA sequences of lead candidates for partners to manufacture, and deployment with "appropriate bigpharma and EU Government authorities". The report adds a target of delivering neutralising antibodies within 60 days of a future outbreak once the process is fully developed; the company's 2021 announcements, reprinted by 1stOncology and reported by Silicon Republic, gave the goal as therapies for new viruses in under 90 days.

The report for the period to 31 May 2022 says the main milestone was met: the screen found SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibodies directly in primary B cells from infected patients, worked against several variants and with other formats such as nanobodies and scFv libraries, and was also tried on T cells. It then lists as "future steps" the expression and characterisation of the lead antibodies, with purified antibody "subsequently evaluated for clinical development". In other words, at the end of the project the work had stopped at the candidate stage. The report itself notes that with the Omicron wave, "the immediate current relevance of new mABs against potential variants of concern is uncertain".

1. Validate the Nanoreactor screen for neutralising antibodiesDeliveredFinal CORDIS report: more than 1,500 binders and 122 candidates from one patient; company data, not peer reviewed.
2. Purified lead antibody for preclinical studiesNot achievedListed as a future step at project end; never announced since.
3. Preclinical safety and efficacy in rodentsNot achievedNo results published by the company or a third party.
4. Lead antibody sequences to manufacturing partnersNot achievedNo partner or licence announced.
5. Deployment with pharma and EU authoritiesNot achievedNo COVID-19 therapy from RemedyBio entered trials or use.
6. Antibodies within 60 to 90 days of a new outbreakUntestedNo new pandemic has tested the claim; no end-to-end run published.

The project closed on schedule after 21 months. It delivered the part that was the company's core expertise, the screen, and not the therapeutic steps that would have made it a pandemic response. Neither the company nor the EU has published the deliverable reports, which CORDIS lists without opening them to the public.

What Came After the Award

The EIC equity was paid. RemedyBio announced it had closed an additional €8 million of equity from the EIC Fund in July 2021, with DCU confirming it stayed a shareholder, and the company sits in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies. The size of the stake has not been disclosed. No private investor or later round has been announced.

From 2022 the company's partnerships moved to oncology. In June 2022 Imperial College London announced a project to use the Nanoreactor to find tumour-infiltrating T cells in gynaecological and other cancers, to be harvested as personalised cell therapy. RemedyBio is a partner in INSPIRE, a Horizon Europe project on inhaled RNA therapy for lung cancer that ran from 1 June 2022 to 28 February 2026, with a net EU contribution of €562,500 for the company, according to CORDIS and its December 2022 announcement. The same month it said it had signed a research and evaluation agreement with GSK to study rare immune cells within tumours, without financial terms, according to a release reprinted by 1stOncology. No outcome of the GSK work has been reported.

The most recent trace is a listing for "RemedyBio Lucid" on the BIO Partnering at JPM Week 2027 site, which describes Lucid Biosystems as developing personalised T-cell therapies for solid tumours on single-cell technology "pioneered by RemedyBio". A separate Lucid Biosystems listing calls it a US-based company that is "currently raising capital to advance to pre-IND readiness". How Lucid relates to Remedy Biologics Limited by ownership is not public, and no register entry linking them was found.

Why Europe Should Care

RapCo-19 was exactly what the Commission later asked for. In May 2021 it proposed an EU Strategy on COVID-19 therapeutics, with a "therapeutics innovation booster" to carry promising candidates from preclinical research to approval and a target of authorising three new COVID-19 therapeutics by October 2021. Two months earlier the Commission's office in Ireland had named Remedy Biologics among the EIC-funded firms working on the pandemic. A European platform that could turn patients' own antibodies into a treatment within weeks would give Europe its own pandemic response capacity. The record shows the gap between that ambition and a screening tool: the speed claim stopped at the shortlist.

The Verdict

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