Resistell's Sepsis Test: What the EIC Accelerator Paid For

When a patient develops sepsis, doctors give broad-spectrum antibiotics first and find out later whether the bacteria are resistant, because the standard susceptibility test needs the bacteria to grow, which takes 24 to 48 hours. Resistell, a spin-off of the Swiss federal institute of technology in Lausanne (EPFL) based in Muttenz near Basel, measures something else: the tiny vibrations of living bacteria on a sensor. If an antibiotic kills them, the motion stops. In the European Innovation Council's March 2020 round, the EU agreed to pay €2,499,437.50 towards a €3,570,625 project, RAPID-SEP-AST, to turn that idea into a sepsis test that answers in "less than 2h", according to CORDIS.

The project ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022. Six years after the award, the company has a device, two peer-reviewed validation papers and a completed multisite clinical study. What it does not have, on the public record, is a hospital customer, a distributor, or a dated announcement of the CE-IVD approval the grant was meant to deliver.

Where Resistell Stands Now

Resistell AG is an active company in the commercial register of the canton of Basel-Landschaft, according to Zefix and Moneyhouse, with no insolvency notice. Its latest register change, published on 7 April 2026, removed co-founder Danuta Cichocka and Dieter Kraft from the board and added Diane Zetzmann-Krien. Cichocka's signing authority was struck off with her board seat. The company's team page still lists her as chief executive; whether she remains in that role has not been announced.

The clearest sign of current activity comes from Brussels. On 7 July 2026 the EIC signed ADAPT-AB, a €300,000 grant coordinated by Resistell that started on 1 September 2026 and runs to 31 May 2027, according to CORDIS. Its subject is not sepsis diagnosis: it plans to link Resistell's nanomotion sensors and its "ResiDaq" data acquisition unit with Festo's laboratory controller so that automated labs screening antibiotic candidates can react to results while an experiment runs. Resistell's staff also co-authored a Scientific Reports paper in March 2026.

The company's own news page has not been updated since April 2024, according to resistell.com.

The Technology: Listening for Bacteria That Stop Moving

Conventional antibiotic susceptibility tests, such as disc diffusion or automated systems like bioMérieux's Vitek2, grow bacteria in the presence of an antibiotic and check whether they multiply. Resistell's Phenotech device instead attaches bacteria to a microscopic cantilever, a sensor beam that a laser reads at up to 60,000 times a second. Living bacteria make the beam vibrate; dying ones do not. Machine learning models classify the recordings as susceptible or resistant, according to the company's product page and its 2024 Nature Communications paper.

That paper, which acknowledges funding from the "European Union's Accelerator grant RAPID-SEP-AST 961141", trained models on 2,762 recordings from 1,180 spiked positive blood cultures covering 364 E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates. Independent testing on 223 strains gave accuracies between 89.5% and 98.9%. The authors describe it as a "2 to 4 h" test. Because the method does not depend on growth, it still needs bacteria from a positive blood culture; the 2026 paper adds a magnetic-bead enrichment step to pull bacteria directly from blood, with fixed 2-hour nanomotion readouts and 94% to 98% sensitivity and specificity across 1,337 blood culture samples.

Speeds have drifted across the company's own material. CORDIS promised "less than 2h". The Phenotech Multistar page now claims "exactly 1 hour", a figure for which no published validation could be found. The Top 100 Swiss Startups profile says "just 2 hours", and the Startupticker profile gives 4 hours for the certified bloodstream test and 2 hours for a second-generation device.

What RAPID-SEP-AST Promised, and What the Record Shows

The European Commission's list of selected companies places Resistell among the "EIC Accelerator 20 March 2020 cut-off date selected COVID19-related projects", grant only, with no other beneficiary on the project. The grant agreement was signed on 15 July 2020. The objective on CORDIS lists four aims: industrialise the device, "finalise CE-IVD approval", run a "multicentre performance evaluation study at KOLs" (leading clinical centres), and scale up first in Europe "using its strong network of EU distributors" and then globally.

The periodic report on CORDIS says production and packaging were optimised, an "automatic assembly line is now in place", the commercial software was built and tested in a clinical setting, and the clinical protocol was approved by an ethics committee. It does not report a CE mark, a completed multicentre study or a distribution agreement. It also gives the test's time to result as "2-4h", wider than the objective's "less than 2h".

The clinical work happened, but mostly after the EU project ended. A single-centre study at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) ran from June 2021 to February 2024 with 300 patients, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. Its 30-patient pilot matched both reference methods and gave results "within 4 hours compared to 11 and 17 hours" for Vitek2 and disc diffusion, according to a December 2021 press release. The multicentre study, PHENOTECH-1, began in January 2023 in Lausanne, Madrid and Innsbruck, according to Resistell, and was stopped on 5 September 2024 with 246 patients enrolled because "statistical power for primary endpoint (sensitivity) for E. coli and K. pneumoniae and ceftriaxone was achieved", according to ClinicalTrials.gov. Neither registry entry has posted results. The only published figures are interim: 97.6% accuracy and a mean of 4.24 hours on the first 85 isolates, according to a March 2024 press release also reported by Startupticker.

1. Industrialise device and disposablesDeliveredAutomatic assembly line and commercial software reported on CORDIS.
2. Finalise CE-IVD approvalClaimed onlyCompany profiles call the bloodstream test "CE IVD-certified"; no dated announcement or notified-body record found.
3. Multicentre performance studyLatePHENOTECH-1 ran 2023 to 2024 at three hospitals; only interim results published.
4. Results in under 2 hoursPartlyMean of 4.24 hours in the study; 2 hours shown for a next-generation device.
5. Scale-up through EU and global distributorsNot achievedNo distributor or hospital customer announced.

There was also a change of plan. When the grant was announced in July 2020, Cichocka told Venture Kick the money would fund "clinical validation in at least three different hospitals in Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark". The hospitals that took part were in Switzerland, Spain and Austria.

What Resistell Has Achieved Since the Award

On the research side, the record is solid. Pfizer funded a project in 2022 to test the method on a new antibiotic, according to Startupticker, and the Nature Communications paper thanks Pfizer for funding work on ceftazidime-avibactam. In March 2023 the Swiss tuberculosis foundation iM4TB began using the Phenotech device to study its drug candidate macozinone, according to Resistell. In 2024 a Eurostars project with Vienna-based Cellectric and CHUV, Phenotech-CF, was awarded nearly €2.7 million, of which €1.54 million for Resistell, to build a cystic fibrosis workflow, according to the company. Resistell is listed as an observer in ERADIAMR, a €1,224,442 JPIAMR research consortium running to March 2027, according to JPIAMR.

On the commercial side, the evidence is thin. The Startupticker profile says Resistell has recently started selling a globally certified research device, without naming a buyer or a date. No sale of the diagnostic test to a hospital laboratory has been announced. Both company profiles say Resistell is now raising money for a high-throughput device, built as a prototype "with an industrial partner".

The Money

Resistell raised a CHF 3.5 million Series A in December 2019, led by OCCIDENT with TRUMPF Venture, Alpana Ventures, Zürcher Kantonalbank and HEMEX, to "achieve CE-mark approval for its first device testing blood stream infections", according to Venture Kick. In December 2022 it closed a first Series B tranche of CHF 8.5 million from the EIC Fund, TRUMPF Venture, OCCIDENT, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Launchpad and private investors, according to Startupticker and the law firm VISCHER. The stated aims were completing clinical trials, seeking certification under the EU's new IVD Regulation and launching Phenotech Research. A second closing planned for 2023 has not been announced.

Total funding figures disagree. The Startupticker profile says CHF 14.6 million of equity and CHF 4 million of grants; the Top 100 Swiss Startups profile says CHF 17 million of equity and CHF 4 million of grants. Resistell's accounts are not public; Moneyhouse shows turnover and staff only behind a paywall, so its revenue, losses and headcount could not be verified. The register shows its nominal share capital, which rose in steps to CHF 375,873 in January 2023 and has not changed since, according to entries in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce.

Why Europe Should Care

Antimicrobial resistance causes "more than 35,000 deaths every year in the EU/EEA", according to the European Commission. On 13 June 2023 the Council of the EU adopted a Recommendation with 2030 targets, including a 20% cut in human antibiotic consumption and a 10% fall in bloodstream infections caused by E. coli resistant to third-generation cephalosporins, the very bug and drug class Resistell's study tested. In November 2025 the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported that antibiotic consumption rose in 2024 and that those E. coli infections had risen by more than 5% since 2019. Rapid susceptibility tests are one of the tools that let doctors switch from broad-spectrum to targeted antibiotics sooner, which is why a European source of such tests fits EU policy.

The Verdict

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