Where Micreos' EIC Accelerator Eczema Enzyme Stands Today

Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium behind MRSA, thrives on the skin of many people with eczema, and antibiotics that kill it also kill the harmless bacteria around it and breed resistance. Micreos, a Dutch biotech company, sells an alternative: an endolysin, an enzyme borrowed from the viruses that infect bacteria, which cuts open the cell wall of S. aureus and leaves other skin bacteria alone. Its consumer brand Gladskin has sold the enzyme, called Staphefekt SA.100, in creams for eczema, acne and rosacea.

In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 3 April 2019, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission picked Micreos for StaphIMPACT, a project to bring SA.100 to the whole European market, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names Micreos of Bilthoven as the only company in the project. The EU contributed €2,495,937.50 to a total cost of €3,978,625 between 1 July 2019 and 31 December 2021, according to CORDIS. Seven years on, the enzyme is on shelves and in a L'Oréal product. Whether it works on eczema is less certain than it was in 2019.

Where Micreos Stands Today

The company that received the grant, Micreos Human Health B.V., is registered as active, with "Gladskin" listed as a trading name, according to OpenCorporates. It filed its balance sheet for 2023 on 22 June 2026 and the one for 2022 on 27 November 2024, according to North Data, which keeps the figures behind a paywall, so the company's revenue, losses and staff could not be checked for this article. Both filings came almost two years or more after the year they cover.

Gladskin still sells. Its US shop and its European shop carry 2026 copyright lines, ship to the US, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, the UK and other countries, and the European site still names its "patented smart protein Staphefekt" as the key ingredient. In March 2023 Gladskin added a line called GladskinMD for sale only through doctors in the US, with an eczema concentrate containing the enzyme under the name Micreobalance, according to a company announcement.

The drug business now sits apart. Micreos recruited Matt Regan, formerly of Abbott, Novo Nordisk and AbbVie, to lead a pharmaceutical company that was to be spun out to Switzerland from January 2022, according to BioSpace. That company, Micreos Pharmaceuticals, lists its address in Baar near Zug and names MEndoB, a newer engineered endolysin against S. aureus, as its lead candidate for atopic dermatitis, according to its website. In March 2025 it hired the Lithuanian contract manufacturer Northway Biotech to make MEndoB to clinical-grade standards and said the drug would enter clinical trials "in the coming months", according to BioSpace and Pharma Manufacturing. No trial start has been announced since, and no later news appears on the company's site.

The Technology: Killing One Species of Bacteria

Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, release endolysins at the end of their life cycle to burst the host cell open. Each enzyme recognises the cell wall of a narrow group of bacteria. Micreos built SA.100 as a chimeric endolysin, stitched from parts of natural enzymes, that kills S. aureus, including MRSA, while sparing commensal skin bacteria such as Staphylococcus epidermidis, according to a 2022 study in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy written mostly by Micreos and ETH Zurich scientists, with co-authors from a Dutch public health laboratory and Boston Children's Hospital, which also describes XZ.700, a more active successor that did not induce resistance in repeated lab exposures. Because the enzyme does not work like an antibiotic, resistant strains remain susceptible and no resistance has been reported, the MAAS trial protocol notes.

The established treatments for eczema are moisturisers and anti-inflammatory creams, mainly corticosteroids, plus antibiotics or antiseptics when the skin is visibly infected. Guidelines do not recommend anti-staph treatment for eczema that is not infected, because a Cochrane review found no clinical benefit from short courses, as the MAAS authors explain. Micreos' case was that an enzyme gentle enough to use every day could do what antibiotics cannot: keep S. aureus down for months without damaging the rest of the skin flora.

What the Trials Found

The best test of that case came from Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. In the MAAS trial (NCT02840955), 100 adults with moderate to severe eczema used either an SA.100 cream supplied by Micreos Human Health or a vehicle cream without the enzyme for 12 weeks. The enzyme group used steroid cream on 45.0% of days and the vehicle group on 37.3%, and the difference was not significant (p=0.97 in the intention-to-treat analysis). Neither culture nor PCR showed any difference in S. aureus reduction. The one positive signal was fewer doctor-reported flares in the per-protocol analysis, 2 against 10 (p=0.03), according to the results letter in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, reproduced in an Erasmus University thesis and listed in the university's repository. It was published in September 2019, two months after StaphIMPACT began.

A second, shorter trial at the Centre for Human Drug Research in Leiden reached a similar result. In 53 adults with mild to moderate eczema, two weeks of SA.100 was "safe and well tolerated", but "no reduction of S. aureus and no changes in microbiome features were seen", and the authors concluded that "our findings do not support short-term clinical use", according to the 2026 paper in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, held in Leiden University's repository. Its authors include Johan Frieling, listed under Micreos Human Health on a 2022 paper written mostly by Micreos and ETH Zurich scientists with hospital and public health laboratory co-authors; who sponsored the trial could not be verified.

The prescription successor has no public result. Micreos Human Health started a 48-patient, placebo-controlled trial of XZ.700 cream in the Netherlands in September 2020 and expected full results by the end of 2021, according to its announcement and PharmaShots. No results could be found five years later, and the pharma company's lead candidate is now MEndoB instead.

What StaphIMPACT Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

CORDIS describes the project as preparation for "full roll-out into the EU markets" of SA.100 and Gladskin, with more production capacity and stronger partnerships. When the award was announced, Micreos told Microbiome Times and apotheke adhoc that the money would increase SA.100 production, pay for further placebo-controlled double-blind studies and widen access to Gladskin across Europe.

The final CORDIS report, covering July 2020 to December 2021, says the scale-up of SA.100 production and of the Gladskin formulation "has been finalized", that the licence with L'Oréal brought the technology into L'Oréal's product range, that a scalp spray was ready for stability testing, and that sales rose "significantly" in target markets. It gives no sales figures and names no clinical study run under the project. The project ended on schedule.

1. Scale up SA.100 and Gladskin productionDelivered"Finalized", per the CORDIS report; products still on sale in 2026.
2. Industry partnershipDeliveredL'Oréal licence, October 2020.
3. Roll-out across European marketsPartlyGladskin ships to several EU countries; no sales figures published.
4. Stronger clinical evidenceNot achievedControlled trials published in 2019 and 2026 found no S. aureus reduction.
5. Scalp spray formulationUnverifiedReady for stability tests in 2021; no launch found.

What Micreos Has Achieved Since the Award

The largest commercial result is the licence. In October 2020 Micreos Human Health licensed its endolysin to L'Oréal for cosmetic skin care worldwide, according to the law firm Jones Day, which advised Micreos, and NutraIngredients. Terms were not disclosed. In September 2021 L'Oréal's La Roche-Posay brought out Lipikar Eczema MED, a cream sold as a medical device with an ingredient called Endobioma that targets S. aureus, according to L'Oréal's 2021 annual report and PTA in Love. Neither source names Micreos as the supplier of Endobioma, so the link between the licence and that product is the CORDIS report's statement, not a confirmed fact.

Gladskin launched in the US in January 2020, saying it had served more than 100,000 people in Europe in 2019, according to PR Newswire. The group raised €30 million in spring 2019, including a €5.4 million Dutch innovation credit, according to Microbiome Times and NutraIngredients; €32 million on 30 September 2021, according to a company release and Silicon Canals; and €25 million announced on 25 October 2022, according to Silicon Canals and CB Insights. No round names its investors, and no round since 2022 has been announced.

The EIC Fund did not invest: the award was grant only, and Micreos does not appear on the EIC Fund's portfolio pages. North Data lists no other EU research project for Micreos Human Health, but it does record a Dutch state aid of €5,376,625 in 2017 under the innovation credit scheme.

Why Europe Should Care

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the few health threats with numbered EU targets. In June 2023 the Council of the EU recommended that member states cut human antibiotic consumption by 20% and the incidence of MRSA bloodstream infections by 15% by 2030, both against 2019, and called for more research and incentives for new antimicrobials and other countermeasures, according to the recommendation text and the Commission's publication. An enzyme that kills MRSA without breeding resistance fits that agenda exactly, and Micreos, with a European production base and research ties to ETH Zurich, is one of few companies with endolysins in human use. The open question is whether the approach changes clinical outcomes, which the eczema trials have so far not shown.

The Verdict

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