SiriusXT, a spin-out company from the UCD School of Physics, has secured €3m in the latest round of Horizon 2020 SME funding. The company was co-founded in 2015 by Dr Kenneth Fahy, Dr Fergal O’Reilly and Dr Paul Sheridan following 10 years of research.

Their work developed the technology that underpins the novel soft x-ray tomography (SXT) microscope, now being commercialised by SiriusXT. It is the first commercial SXT microscope of its kind in the world, allowing researchers to illuminate whole single cells or tissue samples and produce 3D images that cannot be produced in any other way.

Such images reveal, in unprecedented detail, the inner workings of drugs and disease on a cellular scale and enable scientists track how drugs and disease affect specific cells. The company plans to use the €3m to take its technology from prototype to first product, with a pilot system being trialled by an early adopter in the UK in 2017.

CEO Tony McEnroe said: “Our main target market are the thousands of worldwide research laboratories focused on disease research and drug discovery. Our SXT microscopes have a similar engineering complexity and price tag to an electron microscope, and our goal is to make them as ubiquitous as electron microscopes in our target market."

Two other Dublin-based companies, Artomatix and Nuritas, also received funding under this latest Horizon 2020 funding round. Nuritas, a bioinformatics start-up founded by Dr Nora Khaldi, completed the three-month UCD 2013 VentureLaunch Accelerator Programme held at NovaUCD.

In Association with

Altogether, 65 SMEs from 18 countries have been selected in the latest round of Horizon2020 funding. Each project, 56 in total, receives up to €2.5m (€5m for health projects) to finance innovation. The total amount to be distributed between the 65 SMEs is €90 million.

UK Complaints

Disappointed applicants from the UK commented on the Horizon website: “These results show that the UK performed much less well in this cut-off proportionally to the others and confirm the fears we had that UK applicants might be discriminated against because of Brexit.

“We put months of work into our application and since the UK is still contributing to the EU budget for now, we thought we would be guaranteed a fair evaluation, which is also what you told us. This is deeply disappointing and we feel we are entitled to know how you addressed the issue of possible discrimination against UK applicants in the briefing you gave to evaluators.

“Could you please be transparent and share that briefing with us? I think it is our right to know what you have done to prevent this from happening and to assess how this could be prevented more effectively in the future."

Another UK applicant commented: “The whole northern part of Europe is screwed. Our friends from Spain, Italy and Portugal have an 18% success rate! Applicants from Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and France only 6%, on average. This is not an incident; it’s structural in all tender rounds.

“Fact: Most evaluators are southern European. Because of this, southern European are favoured over northern European applications. Big time. It is a heavily corrupted system, exactly the kind of malpractice that makes people vote to leave. The people responsible for this within the EU have to be called to account.”