EIC Accelerator Winner Dalan and the Honeybee Vaccine Race

When American foulbrood is found in a European hive, the usual response is to seal the colony at night, kill the bees and burn the hive. The Italian reference laboratory for bee health states that in the EU "there are no veterinary medicinal products authorised for the treatment of AFB", and a 2020 review in Frontiers in Microbiology notes that antibiotic use against it is forbidden in the Union because of residue rules for honey. Dalan, a US company with a Finnish scientific origin, sells what it calls the first honeybee vaccine, conditionally licensed against that disease in the United States and Canada.

Its Spanish subsidiary, Dalan Bio SL, appears in the EIC's list of companies selected at the 1 October 2025 EIC Accelerator cut-off, for blended finance, with a project titled "Unlocking the power of innate immunity: a scalable vaccine platform for pollinator and invertebrate health". The EIC announced the selection in February 2026. What can be checked is what the company has already done outside Europe, and how far the European side has got.

How a queen passes on immunity

The technology began at the University of Helsinki as PrimeBEE. The university's account credits Dalial Freitak, now Dalan's chief scientific officer, and Heli Salmela with showing that vitellogenin, an egg-yolk protein, binds pathogen fragments that the queen eats and carries them into her eggs, where they prime the next generation's immune response. "Now we've discovered the mechanism to show that you can actually vaccinate them," Freitak said there. The university names Business Finland as the funder.

The product is a killed whole-cell preparation of Paenibacillus larvae, the bacterium that causes American foulbrood. It is mixed into queen candy, a sugar paste. Worker bees eat it and build it into royal jelly, which they feed to the queen, according to the University of Georgia, whose bee programme works with Dalan in Athens, and FoodIngredientsFirst. Diamond Animal Health manufactures it. The alternative differs by continent: Trevor Tauzer, a US beekeeper quoted by FoodIngredientsFirst, said beekeepers there "rely on antibiotic treatment that has limited effectiveness", while in the EU an infected colony is usually destroyed.

What has been licensed, and on what terms

Dalan announced a conditional licence from the USDA Center for Veterinary Biologics in January 2023, for an initial two years, as both the University of Georgia and FoodIngredientsFirst reported at the time. FoodIngredientsFirst quoted the efficacy studies as indicating that the vaccine "may reduce larval death", with no figures. In October 2023 the company announced a conditional licence in Canada, with limited distribution through ASEA Animal Health from spring 2024 and use under veterinary supervision.

The licence is still conditional. In November 2025 Dalan said it had completed efficacy trials designed to meet the USDA's requirements for full licensure, and dvm360 reported that the data were being submitted that month and that full licensure could come "as early as 2027". Neither the company release nor the trade report gives colony numbers or results. No count of vaccinated colonies or sales figure has been published in the sources reviewed.

The European side: a Madrid company and a CDTI grant

The selected beneficiary is not the US company. Dalan Bio SL was registered in Madrid in September 2023, with Dalan Animal Health, Inc. as its sole shareholder and Annette Kleiser as sole administrator, according to the Registro Mercantil data shown by Empresia and eInforma. Its registered activity is trade intermediation (CNAE 4618). The BORME entries record a capital increase from €3,000 to €20,000, published in June 2025. eInforma lists accounts deposited for 2024; no revenue, staff or result figure from them was available in the free records.

In November 2025 the parent announced that Dalan Bio SL had been awarded a €250,000 grant from CDTI, the Spanish innovation agency, for pan-European surveillance of honeybee diseases, and said it "will support European market entry". Pulse 2.0 reported the same grant. Neither gives the grant's dates.

The University of Helsinki's account already named the EU as the next market after the US. Neither Dalan's news page nor web searches on 4 November 2026 turned up an announcement of an EU marketing authorisation for the vaccine, and the company has not announced the EIC selection on that page.

What the EIC project says, and what CORDIS shows

The EIC announced on 17 February 2026 that 61 companies had been selected from 121 interviewed, with total proposed funding of €467 million and 85% on blended finance. The cut-off had drawn 923 full applications. The selection list does not give an amount per company.

A search of CORDIS for "DALAN" on 4 November 2026 returned no project for the company; projects from the 2025 cut-offs are often not listed yet, so this says nothing about whether an agreement has been signed. The project's objectives, budget and dates are therefore not public, and only its title is: a vaccine platform for "pollinator and invertebrate health" built on innate immunity. That wording covers more than one honeybee disease. Dalan's other invertebrate candidate is a shrimp vaccine against white spot syndrome virus, given to broodstock. A January 2026 company release says the offspring of vaccinated shrimp were "significantly resistant" to the virus, without numbers, and INVE Aquaculture announced a collaboration with Dalan in October 2025 without terms. Whether shrimp are part of the EIC project is not stated in the public record.

1. A working oral honeybee vaccineExistsConditionally licensed in the US (January 2023) and Canada (October 2023); full US licensure not before 2027, per dvm360.
2. A platform for further pollinator diseasesEarly dataDeformed wing virus result is a preprint and, per the company, not a product claim.
3. European market entryNot shownNo EU authorisation announced; a CDTI surveillance grant to the Spanish subsidiary.
4. EIC project milestonesNot publicNo CORDIS entry yet; objectives, amount and dates unpublished.

Small rounds for a regulated product

The parent has funded itself in seed rounds. It announced $3.55 million in September 2022, led by At One Ventures and the Veterinary Angel Network for Entrepreneurs, bringing its total to $5.5 million, per BioSpace; then $4.5 million led by Prime Movers Lab, bringing it to $10 million, per Pulse 2.0 in July 2023; and a $3 million SAFE round in November 2025 with Good Growth Capital and Meach Cove Capital, per its release and Pulse 2.0. The Korean company Yuyu Pharma announced a strategic investment in December 2025 without an amount. The size of the EIC award is not public, so it cannot be set against these rounds.

Why the EU has an interest

The Commission's revised pollinators initiative of 2023, "A new deal for pollinators", sets out to reverse their decline, and the Commission states that around four in five crop and wild flowering plant species depend on animal pollination. For managed honeybees, American foulbrood is handled mainly by destroying colonies, per the reference laboratory. A vaccine authorised in the EU would be a new tool where that laboratory lists no authorised medicine, and the EIC selection backs a European subsidiary set up for that market.

Dalan has not been asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.