Innovative Bioimaging: Watching Drugs at Work Inside Living Cells

30. September 2026

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Innovative Bioimaging: Watching Drugs at Work Inside Living Cells

A headache, a pollen allergy, a sleepless night – for many of these problems, medicines already exist. But treatment can also come with unwanted side effects. Many of these drugs share the same mechanism: they act through G protein-coupled receptors. According to Josef Lazar, drugs working through these pathways generate around USD 800 billion in annual sales. Better medicines are needed. Finding them early, before they reach patients, remains difficult and costly.

Vision

Innovative Bioimaging wants to test new drugs more precisely and earlier. Its path starts with microscopes and continues towards specialised readers for high-throughput screening. In the long run, the team wants to go further and become a drug development company itself. As Josef Lazar put it at the meetup, the ambition is to expand ‘from microscopes to readers’ and gradually become a drug development company.

Gamechanger

Innovative Bioimaging combines two technologies developed by the team. FLIP biosensors are molecular sensors that show whether a substance activates a specific signalling pathway inside an individual living cell. The receptors do not need to be modified, and the team has developed sensors for a range of molecular processes involving G protein-coupled receptors. ‘You can clearly see that something has changed in the cell. And we know exactly what is happening inside it at the molecular level,’ Josef Lazar explained at the meetup. But the biosensors require a specialised microscope – so the team developed one too. DynaMic is an ultrafast, highly sensitive confocal microscope for 3D imaging of living cells, developed in collaboration with KU Leuven. According to Josef, it is currently the only microscope on the market capable of imaging their biosensors. It is this combination of technologies that sits at the heart of Innovative Bioimaging.

Who is it for?

For pharmaceutical companies and drug development teams that need to understand, early in the process, what a compound actually does inside a cell. The technology also opens possibilities for research laboratories studying cell signalling and for further applications in drug screening.

What has worked so far?

The team has patented its biosensor technology, with research published in Nature Methods, PNAS and Science Advances. Development is supported by the TAČR SIGMA project and EIC Pathfinder. And the technology has already moved beyond the lab – the team has sold the first DynaMic microscope prototype to Munich.

Innovative Bioimaging is looking for investors and partners who want to stay for the long term and help the team with the next stages of development and market expansion. As Josef Lazar said at the meetup, they are looking for partners who can ‘help us over the long term and go through cycles of innovation and market expansion with us’.

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