Invitris' EIC Accelerator Makes Phages Without Living Cells

Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, can kill pathogens that no antibiotic still touches. Producing them is the problem: today's methods raise biosafety concerns and are often inefficient, unreliable and hard to scale, according to the CORDIS summary of Invitris' EIC project. Invitris, a Munich spin-off of the Technical University of Munich, makes phages from DNA alone, in an extract of E. coli that contains no living cells.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, Phactory, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 from July 2025 to June 2027 to standardise clinical production and run clinical trials of new phage therapies. Sixteen months in, the company reports 20 paid proofs of concept on its website but no trial, and it now markets the platform more broadly, as "the manufacturing layer for AI medicine".

A phage made in a test tube

Invitris goes back to Phactory, a 2018 iGEM student team from TUM and LMU Munich. In 2022 researchers around Gil Westmeyer, with Invitris co-founder Kilian Vogele, published the method in Cell Chemical Biology, TUM announced: phages produced from DNA in a cell-free solution, which avoids contamination with bacterial toxins or other phages. With the Bundeswehr Hospital Berlin, the team isolated a phage against the antibiotic-resistant skin infection of one patient, produced it cell-free and used it against the bacteria.

In 2023 Invitris became the first company to receive €250,000 of Stage II funding from INCATE, the Incubator for Antibacterial Therapies in Europe, to complete its spin-out, Munich Startup reported. It joined Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, where its profile lists six employees and claims the platform makes drug development about 10,000 times more efficient at 100 times lower material cost.

Phactory: from personalised phages to clinical trials

The EIC project is to standardise Phactory's production process for clinical use and to run clinical trials of the efficacy and safety of new phage therapies. CORDIS shows no periodic report yet, and the project page was last updated in November 2025. No phage trial by Invitris has been announced.

The company's website now presents a wider business: "Building the manufacturing layer for AI medicine." It argues that AI can design proteins faster than conventional biomanufacturing can make them, and offers its platform for antibodies, peptides, enzymes and cytotoxic proteins as well as phages, with a claimed four to eight hours from sequence to drug substance and a planned line of autonomous production machines it calls Invitris Pods. Michael Jewett of Stanford University, named as a scientific advisor to the company, is quoted there saying its "autonomous GMP manufacturing capabilities set them apart".

The site also lists the 20 paid proofs of concept, across 26 product classes, in a news item dated 21 May 2026, selection for SPRIND's Orbital Bioworks Challenge in July 2026 and an AI-to-Phage Challenge that CEO Patrick Grossmann launched at the Viruses of Microbes congress in Prague. None of these items has a published result, and no customer or partner company is named.

1. Cell-free phage productionPublishedCell Chemical Biology, 2022, with a single patient case.
2. Commercial tractionCompany-reported20 paid proofs of concept; no customer named.
3. Clinical-grade production processNot reportedNo periodic report on CORDIS.
4. Clinical trials of phage therapiesNot started publiclyNo trial registration announced.

Grants, an accelerator and no disclosed round

Invitris has announced no private financing round. Its disclosed money is the €250,000 from INCATE, the undisclosed terms of Y Combinator's standard batch deal, and the EIC award, which the company describes on its website as €2.5 million of non-dilutive funding plus €10 million of matching equity. No EIC Fund investment has been announced, and the company's German accounts were not obtained for this article.

Phages against antimicrobial resistance

The EIC's case for Phactory is the one the project summary makes: drug-resistant bacteria need alternatives that hit the pathogen without destroying the patient's microbiome, and phages do that selectively where broad-spectrum antibiotics do not. Production is the bottleneck the grant is meant to remove. Invitris' broader pitch to AI-designed proteins may be the larger market, but it is not what the EU money was awarded for.