SYMCEL AB

Their core work

Symcel is a Swedish biotech instrumentation company that develops and sells calScreener, an isothermal microcalorimetry device that measures the heat released by living cells and bacteria in real time. This gives microbiologists and pharma researchers a label-free way to track bacterial growth, antibiotic susceptibility, and metabolic activity — faster and more sensitively than optical density methods. Their H2020 funding specifically supported commercializing calScreener for clinical bacterial analysis and diagnostics. They sit at the intersection of analytical instruments, microbiology, and infectious-disease diagnostics.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Symcel followed a textbook SME Instrument trajectory: the 2016 Phase 1 grant funded a feasibility study on the calScreener concept, and the 2017-2020 Phase 2 grant scaled the same product toward clinical bacterial diagnostics. Rather than branching into new domains, they doubled down on one product line, moving from proof-of-concept to market-ready device. The shift is one of maturity, not topic — from R&D feasibility to commercial deployment in microbiology labs.

They are heading toward commercial deployment of microcalorimetry in clinical microbiology, making them a partner of interest for anyone working on faster antibiotic susceptibility testing or metabolic cell profiling.

How they like to work

Both H2020 grants were SME Instrument awards, which are single-beneficiary by design — so Symcel appears as sole coordinator with no consortium partners in the CORDIS data. This reflects grant type, not isolation: they are a product company that owns its technology end-to-end. Collaborators would typically engage them as a technology supplier or validation partner rather than as a co-developer.

No consortium partners recorded in H2020 because both grants were single-beneficiary SME instruments. Their real network sits outside CORDIS — customers and clinical users of the calScreener device, primarily in microbiology and pharma labs.

What sets them apart

Symcel is one of very few companies commercializing isothermal microcalorimetry for microbiology — a niche where the instrument itself is the differentiator. Unlike generic diagnostics SMEs, they own a specific hardware platform (calScreener) validated through a full SME-1 → SME-2 EU funding path. For partners, this means they bring a finished product to the table, not a research prototype.

Highlights from their portfolio

• BADGER (SME-2)
  EUR 3.57M Phase 2 grant — one of the larger SME Instrument awards, funding full commercialization of their calScreener device for clinical bacterial diagnostics.
• BADGER (SME-1)
  The EUR 50k Phase 1 feasibility study that successfully graduated to Phase 2 — a rare full SME-1 to SME-2 progression, signaling strong EC conviction in the technology.