A new approach examines how individual cells respond to drugs, aiming to identify risks earlier in development.
Updated
April 15, 2026 6:01 PM
Close up of a capsule blister pack. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
DeepCyte, a startup in the drug development space, is focusing on a long-standing problem: why drugs that appear safe in early testing still fail in clinical trials or are withdrawn later due to toxicity. DeepCyte has launched with US$1.5 million in seed funding to build tools that detect and explain the harmful effects of drugs at much earlier stages.
The startup’s approach focuses on how individual cells respond to a drug. Instead of analysing cells in bulk, it studies them one by one. This helps capture differences in how cells react, which are often missed in traditional testing methods.
Drug toxicity remains one of the main reasons for failure in drug development. Methods such as animal testing and bulk cell analysis do not always reflect how human cells behave. This gap has pushed the industry to look for more reliable and human-relevant ways to test drug safety.
DeepCyte combines cell-level data with artificial intelligence. Its platform, MetaCore, studies what is happening inside individual cells by capturing detailed molecular information. This data is used to build large datasets that can train AI models.
Additionally, the company has developed an AI system called DeeImmuno. It is designed to predict whether a drug could be toxic and identify the biological reasons behind it. In internal testing on 100 drugs, the system identified different types of toxicity and their underlying mechanisms with a reported accuracy of 94 percent.
The focus on explaining why a drug is toxic, not just whether it is, reflects a broader shift in the industry. Regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have been encouraging methods that rely more on human cell data and clearer biological evidence. The seed funding will be used to develop and scale these tools. The company aims to help drug developers make earlier decisions, which could reduce costly failures in later stages. Whether tools like this become widely used will depend on how they perform in real-world settings. For now, DeepCyte’s approach highlights a growing effort to make drug testing more precise by focusing on how drugs affect cells at the most detailed level.
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Can SPhotonix’s optical memory technology protect data better than today’s storage?
Updated
January 8, 2026 6:32 PM
SPhotonix's 5D Memory Crystals™. PHOTO: SPHOTONIX
SPhotonix, a young deep-tech startup, is working on something unexpected for the data storage world: tiny, glass-like crystals that can hold enormous amounts of information for extremely long periods of time. The company works where light and data meet, using photonics—the science of shaping and guiding light—to build optical components and explore a new form of memory called “5D optical storage”.
It’s based on research that began more than twenty years ago, when Professor Peter Kazansky showed that a small crystal could preserve data—from the human genome to the entire Wikipedia—essentially forever.
Their new US$4.5 million pre-seed round, led by Creator Fund and XTX Ventures, is meant to turn that science into real products. And the timing aligns with a growing problem: the world is generating far more digital data than current storage systems can handle. Most of it isn’t needed every day, but it can’t be thrown away either. This long-term, rarely accessed cold data is piling up faster than existing storage infrastructure can manage and maintaining giant warehouses of servers just to keep it all alive is becoming expensive and environmentally unsustainable.
This is the problem SPhotonix is stepping in to solve. They want to store huge amounts of information in a stable format that doesn’t degrade, doesn’t need electricity to preserve data and doesn’t require constant swapping of hardware. Instead of racks of spinning drives, the idea is a durable optical crystal storage system that could last for generations.
The company’s underlying technology—called FemtoEtch™—uses ultrafast lasers to engrave microscopic patterns inside fused silica. These precisely etched structures can function as high-performance optical components for fields like aerospace, microscopy and semiconductor manufacturing. But the same ultra-controlled process can also encode information in five dimensions within the crystal, transforming the material into a compact, long-lasting archive capable of holding massive amounts of information in a very small footprint.
The new funding allows SPhotonix to expand its engineering team, grow its R&D facility in Switzerland and prepare the technology for real-world deployment. Investors say the opportunity is significant: global data generation has more than doubled in recent years and traditional storage systems—drives, disks, tapes—weren’t designed for the scale or longevity modern data demands.
While the company has been gaining attention in research circles (and even made an appearance in the latest Mission Impossible film), its next step is all about practical adoption. If the technology reaches commercial viability, it could offer an alternative to the energy-hungry, short-lived storage hardware that underpins much of today’s digital infrastructure.
As digital information continues to multiply, preserving it safely and sustainably is becoming one of the biggest challenges in modern computing. SPhotonix’s work points toward a future where long-lasting, low-maintenance optical data storage becomes a practical alternative to today’s fragile systems. It offers a more resilient way to preserve knowledge for the decades ahead.