EIC Accelerator Winner Pixelgen and the Spatial Proteomics Race

Diseases such as cancer can start when proteins stop working together properly, and the company's EIC project describes the established ways of mapping them as microscopy-dependent, low in resolution and expensive. Pixelgen Technologies, a Stockholm company founded in 2020, skips the optics. Its Proximity Network Assay tags more than 150 cell surface proteins with DNA barcodes, links neighbouring tags into a network and reads the result on an ordinary DNA sequencer, so that software can rebuild a three-dimensional map of each cell.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, PNA, at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 29 September 2025 with an EU contribution of €2,499,999, running from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2027. The company announced on 30 June 2025 that it had been awarded €12.5 million (about $14.7 million) in grant and equity financing, a figure repeated by Nordic Life Science and Pulse 2.0. None of them gives the split between grant and equity, and no announcement of the equity investment itself could be found.

Proteins turned into DNA

The idea has a lineage. Fredriksson co-founded Olink with Ulf Landegren around a different DNA-based method, the Proximity Extension Assay, which counts proteins in blood by letting antibody pairs carrying DNA tags meet on their target. The European Patent Office describes that history and says Thermo Fisher acquired Olink for €2.84 billion in 2023; Flat Capital's release of August 2026 also names Fredriksson as an Olink co-founder.

Pixelgen's first method, Molecular Pixelation, was published in Nature Methods on 8 May 2024 with researchers from Karolinska Institutet; the university noted that Pixelgen's founders and employees took part in the study and that the company is commercialising it. Its successor, the Proximity Network Assay, was described in a bioRxiv preprint posted on 24 June 2025 by Karlsson, Fredriksson and colleagues: 155 proteins, more than 40,000 spatial nodes per cell, and "an estimated spatial resolution of ∼50 nm". The preprint has not been peer reviewed as far as this search found.

The figures in the EIC project differ from the company's own. The CORDIS objective claims "an unprecedented 30 nm resolution" and more than 150 markers; the launch release of 24 February 2025, Lab Manager's product note and the preprint all give an average of 50 nanometres.

A kit on sale before the grant started

The core product was on the market before the grant period began. Pixelgen launched the Proxiome Kit with its Immuno 155 panel in February 2025, eight months before PNA started; the release describes it as working like a sample preparation kit for sequencing, for cells in suspension from blood, bone marrow, cell lines and dissociated organoids. In June 2026 the company launched a second version that, by its account, cuts the cell input per sample from 500,000 to 50,000, runs up to 64 samples in a week and lets users add two antibodies of their own. No second source covering v2 could be found.

The data side is open. Raw sequencing output is processed by Pixelator, a pipeline Pixelgen publishes on nf-core, the community repository for bioinformatics workflows.

Customers are described rather than named. Flat Capital's release says users include leading academic institutions and pharmaceutical companies, mainly in Europe and North America. The named partners are service and distribution firms: Carolina Molecular in North Carolina became the first certified US service provider in November 2025, and MDxK, part of DKSH, took on distribution in South Korea after earlier agreements in Japan and Australia. BioSpectrum Asia dates the MDxK deal 16 December 2025; the company's news page lists it on 27 January 2026. In March 2026 Pixelgen announced a collaboration with Andreas Lundqvist's group at Karolinska Institutet to look for markers of response to checkpoint inhibitors in non-small cell lung cancer.

What the EIC is paying for

The CORDIS objective sets out to take PNA from TRL 6 to TRL 9 through three strands of work: reagent development, sample preparation protocols for formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue and for cell-to-cell interaction studies, and data software that fits into multi-omics platforms. The company's June 2025 release named the same targets: cell-to-cell interactions, cell communication and fixed tissue.

A year into the two-year grant, the published product does not yet cover those two applications. The v2 release lists blood, bone marrow, cell lines and dissociated organoids, with a PFA fixation protocol, and mentions neither FFPE tissue nor cell-to-cell interaction. CORDIS shows no periodic report or results for PNA, a year into a two-year project.

1. A commercial PNA kitOn saleProxiome Kit launched February 2025, before the grant began; v2 in June 2026.
2. Data software for multi-omics integrationIn partPixelator is public on nf-core; integration with other omics platforms is not described.
3. FFPE tissue protocolNot yetNot among the sample types in the v2 release of June 2026.
4. Cell-to-cell interaction assayNot yetNo product or protocol announced.
5. TRL 9 by September 2027RunningProject ends 30 September 2027.

Sales up, losses up more

The summary accounts shown by hitta.se, which uses Dun & Bradstreet data, put net sales at SEK 5.9 million in 2023, SEK 3.8 million in 2024 and SEK 9.9 million in 2025, the first year the Proxiome Kit was on sale. The net loss widened from SEK 35.6 million to SEK 41.6 million and then SEK 56.1 million. Staff went from 21 to 29 to 31. Funnelfeedr, citing Statistics Sweden, lists the company as active with sales of SEK 5 to 10 million and 20 to 49 employees, which is consistent.

Equity rose from SEK 44.5 million to SEK 59.3 million in 2025 despite the loss, and short-term liabilities rose from SEK 3.8 million to SEK 18.7 million; the summary figures do not show the source of the new capital. The rounds the company has announced are a Series A of about $7.3 million in October 2023, led by Industrifonden with Navigare Ventures (BioSpace, ArcticStartup), and a Series B of $15.5 million, about SEK 150 million, announced on 20 August 2026. Flat Capital led the Series B with about SEK 40 million, per its own release, and Industrifonden and Navigare continued, per the company and PR Newswire. The Series B release does not mention the EIC.

Why it matters to Europe

The Commission's life sciences strategy of 2 July 2025 aims to make the EU the most attractive place for life sciences by 2030, and the PNA objective ties itself to the European Health Union's goals for diagnostics and personalised treatment. Pixelgen's pitch in that frame is an instrument-free kit that runs on the sequencers laboratories already own, developed by a Stockholm company. The CORDIS policy trackers for PNA, which cover climate, biodiversity, clean air, digital and artificial intelligence spending, all sit at 0%.

Pixelgen was not asked for comment. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.