Spin-off companies

The activities in research and technology at PSI open up a great variety of opportunities for commercial exploitation. If these technologies or services apply to an entrepreneurial scientist, they open up opportunities for the foundation of a start-up company.
PSI fosters and encourages the foundation of spin-off companies through advice and coaching from the transfer centre and various different support tools.
A spin-off company of PSI is a newly founded enterprise which is based on technologies or know-how created in the research activities at Paul Scherrer Institut whether or not former PSI employees are involved.
An overview of the Spin-Offs of the whole ETH-Domain can be found on www.spied.ch.

XRnanotech

XRnanotech is a spin-off that develops and markets nanostructured diffractive optics. Such optical elements are used where conventional optics, e.g. made of glass, fail. They make it possible to record images with the highest resolution and thus make the smallest structures visible.
XRnanotech has managed to perfect the production of such nanostructured components and has been able to demonstrate unprecedented resolution in X-ray microscopy. This should lead to new insights in many areas of science and industry in the future. To this end, XRnanotech is already working with many international customers and marketing unique nanostructured optics.

Website: www.xrnanotech.com
Contact: Florian Döring, florian.doering@psi.ch

Araris Biotech AG

Araris Biotech AG is a company focused on generating and developing so-called antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). ADCs enable the delivery of highly-potent compounds precisely to certain cells (e.g. cancer cells) within the human body without harming healthy tissues. Araris has thereby discovered a new type of glue with which the drug can be rapidly and precisely attached onto the antibody without that they need to be engineered as today. Thanks to this glue pharma companies will not only save a lot of time and costs to generate these conjugates but they will also be very stable. Araris’ ADCs are expected to have an increase therapeutic efficiency with less side-effects.

Website: www.ararisbiotech.com
Contact: Philipp Spycher, pspycher@ararisbiotech.com

RADEC

RADEC utilizes high energy particles generated using particle accelerators located at PSI and elsewhere to test existing electronic components and materials for their resistance (hardness) to radiation. The company also offers advice and assistance to help their customers to develop and construct components and subsystems that are radiation hard. RADEC works together with companies involved in creating technologies for space, as well as companies developing terrestrial technology where failure due to radiation must be eliminated.

Website: www.radec.ch/
Contact: Radoslaw Marcin Marcinkowski, radec@radec.ch;

GratXray

GratXray’s vision is to provide all women painless, precise and efficient breast cancer imaging. For this, we develop a grating interferometry breast computed-tomography device (GI-BCT), a disruptive X-ray technology, which allows to simultaneously acquire absorption-, refraction- and scattering-based X-ray images. Those are capable of detecting subtle electron density variations and local small-angle scattering, generated by microscopic density fluctuations in the tissue, which yields to unprecedented lesion delineation and tissue discrimination.

Website: www.gratxray.com/
Contact: Dr. Martin Stauber, martin.stauber@gratxray.com;

novatlantis ltd – non-profit private limited company

novatlantis is non-profit private limited consulting and service company, independent in terms of human resources and organizational structure, working in the field of sustainability and knowledge transfer. The company’s services focus on applied research projects and the transformation of applied science into pilot projects in cities and communities. novatlantis offers conceptual and strategic consulting, portfolio management, project management, accompanying research, coordination and public relations activities for private and public companies. In addition, the company supports knowledge- and technology transfer between science, economy and the public sector. One of its current products are online municipality-energy-maps, visualizing information from the federal buildings and dwellings statistics (DBS).

Website: www.novatlantis.ch/
Contact: Dr. Anna Roschewitz, anna.roschewitz@novatlantis.ch;

novoMOF

novoMOF is a technology company in the field of advanced materials with focus on synthesis and production of metal-organic frameworks (MOF). MOFs are novel materials that offer competitive applications in various industrial sectors. For instance, charging times of batteries can be reduced to minutes, the lifetime of packaged food can be prolonged or gases such as carbon dioxide can be separated, purified or stored. We partner with leaders from different industries who want to exploit MOFs early as an innovation opportunity. We enable and shape this process early on by providing such companies access to custom MOFs based on their intended application.

Website: www.novomof.com/
Contact: Daniel Steitz, daniel.steitz@novoMOF.com;

InterAx Biotech Ltd

InterAx is uniquely positioned to assist drug candidate design and selection by integrating bioanalytical and computational pharmacology in partnership projects with Biotech and Pharma companies. InterAx applies mathematical models and simulations to in house-derived bioanalytical data in order to address the complexity of drug-induced cellular signaling mechanisms. Our goal is to close the gap between laboratory experiments and in vivo studies by streamlining the critical processes of drug candidate design and selection, thereby significantly reducing the risks, costs and duration of drug discovery and development of new drugs.

Website: interaxbiotech.com
Contact: Luca Zenone, zenone@interaxbiotech.com

leadXpro AG

Website: www.leadXpro.com
Contact: Prof. Dr. Michael Hennig, Michael.Hennig@leadXpro.com

Advanced Accelerator Technologies AG

The aim of “Advanced Accelerator Technologies” (AAT) is to render PSI’s broad technological skills and expertise increasingly accessible on a global scale by joining forces with industrial companies that operate in the field of research equipment. The foundation of AAT with the theme complex Accelerators and Applied Technologies is simultaneously one of the four pillars of PARK innovAARE, which is being developed at PSI as part of the Swiss innovation park.
Dr. Jens Rehanek, jens.rehanek@aa-t.ch;

Website: www.aa-t.ch

4Quant

In the field of medical image analytics, we aim to disrupt the expensive, time-consuming, error-prone task of manually examining images by applying Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning. We scale the medical expertise of Radiologists by transforming their deep medical knowledge into robust algorithms. Analytics on vast amounts of images allows for significantly better biomarker detection in cohorts and time series, huge efficiency gains, as well as new research methods in clinical trials. Our office is located in Zurich. 4Quant was established as ETH/PSI spin-off in 2015 and has 3 employees.

Website: www.4quant.com

Excelsus Structural Solutions

Excelsus Structural Solutions offers easy and affordable access to unique Synchrotron-based characterization tools developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute, to enhance the selection, development and manufacturing of high-quality (bio)pharmaceutical products.

Website: www.excelsusss.com
Contact: Fabia Gozzo, Excelsus’CEO, Fabia.gozzo@excelsus2s.com

Expose GmbH

Expose provides services on all aspects of protein crystallography to companies and organisations in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological sector. The company organises measurement shifts at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) and carries out the corresponding analyses. Providing support for evaluations completes the range of services.

Website: www.expose-crystals.com
Contact: diez@expose-crystals.com

SwissNeutronics AG

SwissNeutronics is the world-leading supplier of advanced neutron optics, which are an inevitable equipment for the scientific instrumentation at modern neutron research facilities. Key developments are the super-polishing of large area substrates (glass, silicone, metals) and their coating with thin film neutron supermirror (multilayer stack up to 10000 layers). As a result, the reflectivity of the supermirror is approaching the theoretical limits. The excellent supermirror, combined with sophisticated designs and high precision machining and assembly enable for first-class neutron optical devices. Moreover, SwissNeutronics owns a profound expertise in the neutronic and engineering design of neutron optics and of complete beam lines as well as for their installation. These capabilities are also provided to industry in Switzerland, beyond the field of neutron optics.

Website: www.swissneutronics.ch
Contact: tech@swissneutronics.ch

DECTRIS AG

DECTRIS is the first company worldwide to sell innovative hybrid-pixel X-ray detector systems which operate in single-photon-counting mode. This new technology features a very high dynamic range, a short readout time and an excellent signal-noise ratio. These properties significantly improve measurement quality and throughput. They can be used in various different areas, such at synchrotron light sources, laboratory diffraction systems or industrial and medical applications.

Website: www.dectris.com

EULITHA AG

EULITHA's Extreme Ultraviolet Interference Lithography (EUV-IL) at the PSI Swiss Light Source (SLS) produces extremely tiny and dense periodic nanostructures with resolutions below 20 nm. This production technology can be used for the mass production e.g. of hard disk drives with a one hundred times higher storage capacity compared with the current state of the art, or photonic nanostructures for LEDs and colour displays or for the manufacture of innovative biosensors.

Website: www.eulitha.com
Contact: Dr. Harun Solak, +41 56 310 4279, harun.solak@eulitha.com