Phaseform and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) have been selected as one of the pilots of InnoMatch Open Call 1 (Wave 2) — the EIC Awardee + Buyer track of InnoMatch, powered by the EIC Innovation Procurement Programme. Thirteen pilots were chosen from sixty applications, each funded with a €60,000 grant.

The challenge: a blood-brain barrier on a chip

The challenge comes from the DZNE in Bonn. Its Laboratory Automation Technologies team has built a blood-brain barrier on a chip: 3D microvessels grown from human iPSC-derived brain endothelial cells, in a multi-well format made for screening which drug candidates can cross into the brain (Fengler et al., Biomaterials 2022).

The read-out is microscopy, and that is where the model fights back. On a spinning-disk confocal the picture is sharp near the objective and degrades with depth: the chip and the 3D vessel itself distort the light, so the far side of the model is hard to analyse — and harder still in live-cell imaging, where the contrast cannot simply be bought back with a longer exposure or more illumination.

What PHI brings to it

That is where PHI comes in, our plug-and-play adaptive optics module. It attaches to the microscope’s camera port and corrects the wavefront distortions introduced by the chip, by the sample and by the optical system, so that the whole 3D vessel can be imaged at uniform quality — not only the part nearest the objective.

The pilot puts PHI on the spinning-disk confocal of the DZNE Light Microscope Facility, on fixed and on live microvessels. A permeability screen is only as good as the volume it can actually measure; the point of the pilot is to make that volume the whole vessel.

Bonn is on our calendar twice this year: we are also a sponsor of the 6th Day of Intravital Microscopy, which the DZNE hosts on 23 and 24 November 2026.

Let’s see the whole vessel.

InnoMatch is funded by the European Union under the EIC Innovation Procurement Programme. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.