Planktovie

Since its creation in 2016, PLANKTOVIE develops and commercializes nutritional solutions from marine plankton dedicated to zebrafish1maintenance in laboratories. The French startup also develops equipment (e.g. FISH GUNs, an automatic zebrafish diet dispenser developed in collaboration with Sorbonne University in Paris), and offers consulting services to improve nutritional protocols in research centers. PLANKTOVIE has more than 250 customers across Europe including pharmaceutical companies (ROCHE, SERVIER, SANOFI, NESTLE) and public institutes (Max-Planck, INSERM, King’s College London, etc.). This growing activity has a turnover doubling each year (200 k€ in 2019) and is expected to grow over the next 3-5 years at this same rate. Thanks to its expertise in plankton culture, PLANKTOVIE has embarked in 2018 on an ambitious R&D program for the development of a photobioreactor (PBR), called the DINOPHYT, aiming to culture migroalgae known to produce highly bioactive molecules of interest for their pharmacological properties. In collaboration with the University of Aix-Marseille, through a European funding from SME Instrument Phase 1 and a national funding from the SATT Sud Est, PLANKTOVIE developed a 200L-PBR prototype allowing, for the first time, to grow dinoflagellates microalgae at industrial scale level. It is possible to isolate from this biomass potent bioactive molecules (i.e. phycotoxins) with ion channel modulation capacities, addressing the drug development market.