UVERA's Bacterial Sunscreen: EIC Accelerator Grant, Low Yields

A sunscreen sold in the EU may only use UV filters that the EU has approved one by one. UVERA, a start-up from Łódź, set out to add a natural one: scytonemin, a brown pigment that cyanobacteria have used as a sun shield for about two billion years, as the company told the European Investment Bank. In the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot in May 2020, the European Commission selected the company for a grant to build a pilot plant and register the ingredient. The pilot plant ran. The pigment yield did not reach the level an industrial plant needs, and six years after selection the filter is still not on the EU's list of permitted UV filters.

UVERA was selected at the 19 May 2020 cut-off, according to the Commission's list of selected Green Deal projects, which names the company alone, with no partner companies. The grant agreement for the project, also called UVERA, was signed on 22 September 2020; the EU contributed €2,493,163.75 to a total cost of €3,561,662.50, and the project ran from 1 October 2020 to 30 June 2024, according to CORDIS. EIT Health, which had accelerated the company, reported the award as €2.5 million in August 2020.

Where UVERA Stands Now

UVERA is still a registered, active company. The full extract from Poland's National Court Register (KRS) shows no liquidation, insolvency or restructuring entry, and records that the company filed its audited 2025 accounts, the auditor's report, the shareholders' approval and a management report on 29 June 2026. It has filed accounts every year since its first financial year, which ran from November 2018 to December 2019. The management board has had the same two members since registration; the register masks their names, but its initials and roles match Magdalena Jander, president, and Adam Kiciak, whom the website names as the management board.

The same register shows a company that has contracted. In October 2024, four months after the EIC project ended, UVERA deleted both of its registered branches: one in Huelva, in south-west Spain, and one in Gutkowo, near Olsztyn in north-east Poland. The company website still lists the Huelva address as a branch office, and its news section stops in May 2022. The register extract does not contain the accounts themselves, and the official financial-statement repository could not be accessed for this article. The data provider EMIS, which shows only percentage changes for free, reports that between the two latest years it holds, total assets fell by 51.68% and total equity by 964.28%, while net sales rose by 90.95%. A fall in equity of more than 100% from a positive starting value means equity turned negative; the absolute figures could not be verified, and EMIS gives both "2025" as its latest financial year and 15 April 2025 as its last update.

The Technology: A Sun Shield From Desert Bacteria

Scytonemin is a yellow-brown pigment that some cyanobacteria build into their outer sheath to absorb ultraviolet light. A 2021 review in Marine Drugs describes it as "a promising UV-screen and antioxidant small molecule with commercial value in cosmetics and medicine" that is made only by some cyanobacteria. The same review shows the difficulty: in one species, the dry-weight ratio of sheath sugars to scytonemin was estimated at about 100 to 1, and, the authors wrote, enhanced production through metabolic engineering "has not been reported". They list growing the cells first and stressing them to produce pigment later, so-called two-stage cultivation, as a standard strategy.

UVERA's approach was to isolate wild strains from extreme environments, a field in which co-founder Jacek Wierzchos had worked, grow them without genetic modification in closed tube reactors, then expose them to UV light so that they produce the pigment, according to the project's final report. The company pitched the process as running on sunlight and CO2, with oxygen and a biomass that could be sold as fertiliser as by-products. Its patent application, WO 2022/250557, filed with a Polish priority date of 28 May 2021, covers the isolation and culture of the strains, their growth media and "a form of scytonemin". Google Patents lists national filings in at least 13 jurisdictions, including a European application still pending and a Spanish utility model for "scytonemin crystals" granted in January 2025.

The commercial case rests on the safety record of existing filters. UVERA's materials say synthetic filters can disrupt hormones, damage DNA and harm coral reefs. These are the company's claims and are not tested here. What is not disputed is the barrier to market: in the EU, a cosmetic product may only contain UV filters listed in Annex VI of the Cosmetics Regulation, under Article 14 of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009. A search of the Commission's CosIng database on 15 October 2026 returned no entry for scytonemin at all, while established filters such as bemotrizinol appear with their Annex VI reference.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

When the grant was announced, Jander said it would pay for a pilot bioproduction plant and for "full certification and registration of the product", according to MamStartup; AIN reported the same two goals. The CORDIS objective went further: to offer the cosmetics market a natural UV protector produced "on industrial scale". In December 2021 the company told the EIB it was producing the molecule "in small amounts", testing it in formulations with some cosmetics companies, and building a pilot factory, with a plan to license the molecule rather than manufacture at scale.

The final report, covering October 2021 to June 2024, is unusually frank. The company scaled up biomass production in closed reactors and defined the assumptions for the engineering design of an industrial "Biofactory". But lab-scale data had suggested "a promising yield of scytonemin", and at semi-industrial scale "the scytonemin yield was lower than anticipated". Multiple validation trials, the report says, "confirmed that the industrial-scale production would not meet the necessary yield requirements". The company then dropped the two-stage process and switched to applying UV stress during cultivation, a method that "potentially" improves yields. Extraction and purification at scale "proved to be complex". A formula based on the pigment showed absorbance in the UVA and UVB range comparable to SPF 30 and 50 products in the lab, but the report says further studies are needed to standardise the measurement, and that dermatological and clinical testing protocols were "planned", not run. It records one licensing agreement "for further development of scaling-up" without naming the partner. The project ended on its CORDIS end date; whether that date had been extended is not public.

1. Pilot bioproduction plantDeliveredPhotos of the pilot plant and tube reactors in operation in the final report.
2. Patent protectionDeliveredPCT application WO 2022/250557; Spanish utility model granted January 2025.
3. Industrial-scale productionNot achievedYields too low for the planned biofactory; process redesigned.
4. Certification and registrationNot achievedNo entry for scytonemin in CosIng; clinical tests only planned.
5. Ingredient sold to cosmetics brandsNot achievedNo product, customer or supply deal announced.
6. Licensing partnerPartlyOne licensing agreement reported; partner and terms not public.

What UVERA Has Achieved Since the Award

Most of UVERA's public recognition came early. It won the EIT Health InnoStars Awards in November 2019 and the biotech category of EIT Health Catapult in December 2020, and was a finalist in the EIB Institute's Social Innovation Tournament in 2021, according to the company website and the EIB. Before applying, it received a Polish "Eurogrant" of PLN 280,060 to prepare its EIC Accelerator application, its website says.

Its share capital grew from PLN 141,100 at registration to PLN 162,265 in September 2020 and PLN 180,850 in January 2022, the register shows; no increase has been registered since. The issue price of the new shares, and so the amount raised, is not in the extract. The final CORDIS report says the company had raised "over EUR 3.5 million" in total for R&D and pilot prototyping and was "now fundraising to scale up production". No funding round has been announced since, and the EU's EIC Fund portfolio does not list UVERA, which is consistent with its grant-only award.

The one new project made public since the grant uses the by-product, not the sunscreen. In 2023 UNDP's Polish Challenge Fund backed a USD 40,000 project to test UVERA's cyanobacterial biomass as fertiliser for vineyards in Georgia, with the local partner Euphoria Wines, according to a press release on the company's site. Its results have not been published. No peer-reviewed paper with a UVERA affiliation on scytonemin could be found.

Why Europe Should Care

The EIC chose UVERA in its first Green Deal round, and the project fits the EU's environmental agenda. The Commission's Zero Pollution Action Plan, adopted on 12 May 2021, aims to cut pollution of air, water and soil to levels no longer harmful to health and ecosystems by 2050, with the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability as a headline action against hazardous chemicals. A biologically produced UV filter, made in Europe without synthetic chemistry, would serve both aims and give European cosmetics makers an ingredient that does not depend on chemical supply chains.

The case also shows the limits of a 45-month grant for this kind of product. A new UV filter needs both an economic production process and a full safety assessment before it can be sold in the EU, and UVERA's grant ended with the first still unsolved. That is a fair outcome for a high-risk biotech project; the gap is that, two years after the project closed, nothing public shows how the company plans to close it.

The Verdict

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