Welcome to this week's issue of Deep Tech Brief.
Every Saturday, we break down deep tech companies building genuinely hard things, in plain language. No jargon, no hype.
Three companies this week: a ten-minute brain check for newborns from Cork, breast milk's key protein brewed in Porto, and desalination powered by a few volts in Paris.
Let’s dive in.
1. CergenX: a brain check for every newborn
Some babies go through a difficult birth, with too little oxygen reaching the brain, and in the first hours afterwards it is hard to tell which of them has been hurt. By CergenX's figures, more than a million newborns worldwide are affected by brain injury every year.
Timing matters. The main treatment for one of the commonest forms of injury is cooling the baby's body for several days to protect the brain, and it works best when it starts within six hours of birth.
The best tool for spotting which babies need it is EEG, a recording of the brain's electrical activity through sensors on the scalp. The hard part is reading it. That is a specialist skill, and specialists are rare. By the company's count, more than 80% of hospitals worldwide cannot offer EEG assessment at all.
CergenX, spun out of University College Cork's INFANT research centre in 2021, puts that expertise in a box. Its device, Wave, uses four sensors on the baby's head, a small amplifier and a tablet. It records ten minutes of brain activity, and the company's AI returns a simple result in as little as 30 seconds. Any doctor or nurse on a newborn unit can run it.
Newborn hearing tests made the same journey, from specialist investigation to a quick check most babies in Europe get before going home. CergenX wants brain checks to follow.
Where they are: co-founded by chief executive Jason Mowles and Professor Geraldine Boylan, who directs INFANT. The company has raised more than €11 million in investment and grants, with backing from Enterprise Ireland. Wave received Breakthrough Device designation from the US Food and Drug Administration in January 2025, and in September gained its CE mark, clearing it for sale across Europe. A multi-hospital clinical study began this autumn, and a US submission is planned.
One to watch. A European approval plus an FDA breakthrough designation is rare progress for a company this size, and the medical need is about as clear as it gets. The milestone ahead is adoption: getting Wave onto the newborn units that have no EEG today, with US clearance to follow.
Learn more: cergenx.com
2. PFx Biotech: breast milk's star protein, without the cow
Breast milk carries ingredients that help a baby's immune system and gut get started. One of the most important is lactoferrin, a protein that binds iron and helps fend off bacteria.
Infant formula is built mostly from cow's milk, which falls short in two ways. Cow's milk contains very little lactoferrin, and the cow version is not quite the same molecule as the human one. And by the company's figures, more than 15 million children worldwide are allergic to cow's milk protein. Chief executive Ali Osman's own son was one of them, which is how the company began.
Even the cow version is scarce. Mature cow's milk holds less than a tenth of a gram of lactoferrin per litre, according to a 2023 scientific review, so a single kilogram means processing well over 10,000 litres of milk.
PFx Biotech, founded in 2022 at UPTEC, the University of Porto's science park, makes the human version with no milk at all. It uses precision fermentation: a microbe is given the instructions for human lactoferrin, then grown in steel tanks on water, sugar and nutrients, much as a brewery makes beer. The result, by the company's account, is the same lactoferrin found in breast milk, and free of cow's milk allergens.
In the US, New York's Helaina already sells human lactoferrin made this way. PFx is building for Europe, with lactoferrin first and other milk proteins to follow, for babies, older adults and athletes.
Where they are: founded by Osman, Harry Barraza and head of research Diana Oliveira. In early 2025 the company won a European Innovation Council Accelerator award that includes a €2.5 million grant, and in June 2025 it closed a €2.5 million seed round led by Buenavista Equity Partners with EIT Food and Beta Capital. By its own account, it has completed pilot runs in 150-litre fermenters and is moving to far larger tanks. It is preparing an application to the European Food Safety Authority, which must approve any new food ingredient sold in the EU.
Worth watching, because it starts from a real family problem and a real gap in what babies are fed, and European funders have backed it early and heavily. The milestone ahead is the double test facing every fermentation company: making the protein at industrial volume and a sensible cost, then winning European food-safety approval.
Learn more: pfxbiotech.com
3. Ilion Water Technologies: desalination with volts instead of pressure
Fresh water is scarcer than most people assume: a widely cited 2016 study in Science Advances found that around four billion people face severe water scarcity for at least one month every year.
Taking the salt out of seawater is the obvious answer. The dominant method is reverse osmosis: pumps force seawater through a fine membrane that lets water pass and holds the salt back. It works, but it is brute force. By Ilion's figures, the pressure involved reaches 60 bar, roughly what you would feel 600 metres under the sea. Those pumps make plants expensive to build and power-hungry to run, at around 3.6 kilowatt hours for every cubic metre of fresh water, by one industry estimate. By the company's count, more than 22,500 desalination plants worldwide still serve only about 3% of the world's population.
Ilion, a spin-out of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, takes the pressure away. Its patented system uses a highly charged membrane and a low electrical voltage, just a few volts, to move water across while holding salt back. The company calls it biomimetic, closer to how living cells move water and salt than to a pump. Without those pumps, it says, plants become cheaper to build, use less energy and need no chemicals.
The science comes from Professor Lydéric Bocquet, a pioneer in how water behaves in channels a few millionths of a millimetre wide, whose European Research Council-funded work produced the idea. And the company says it works with the standard membranes desalination plants already use, so existing plants could be retrofitted.
Where they are: incorporated in February 2025 and led by chief executive Dr Lucie Ries and chief technology officer Zacharie Pilo, with Bocquet as scientific adviser. A €3.8 million pre-seed round in March, including €1.3 million in non-dilutive funding, was co-led by Demea Sustainable Investment and Critical Path Ventures, with support from Bpifrance and CNRS Innovation. The money funds scale-up and its first field trials with industrial partners.
Worth watching, because it goes after the single heaviest part of desalination, the pressure, while keeping the membranes the industry already trusts, and the science behind it is world-class. The milestone ahead is the field trial: showing that a few volts can do the job on real seawater, at real volumes, month after month.
Learn more: ilion-watertech.com
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See you next Saturday.
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