Israeli startup ProFuse Technology—best known for media supplements that optimize muscle tissue formation in cultivated meat—has raised $1.5 million to support its transition into a muscle health discovery platform as GLP-1 penetration increases.
The capital injection from investors including Green Circle Foodtech Ventures, Siddhi Capital and Tempo Beverages, will help ProFuse further develop its high throughput screening platform for dietary supplements and therapeutics that can tackle muscle atrophy.
While muscle loss is often associated with aging (sarcopenia), it is also a well-publicized side effect of GLP-1 drugs, prompting a surge of interest in ingredients that can attenuate the problem, Green Circle partner and MD Graham Anderson told AgFunderNews.
“The GLP-1 trend is not going away. A huge percentage of folks is now on these drugs so we see tremendous opportunity on the drug side. But the supplement side is not to be ignored either and could certainly provide some revenue in the interim. This is an arc that’s going to be going on for 20 years as they keep finding new things that GLP-1s are good for, so we’re going to have to find ways to manage side effects.”
His comments came as marketing analytics company Blue Chalk released a report estimating that 13.1% of US adults are now taking GLP-1 drugs, with penetration expected to increase as pill formats gain traction and the drugs become available to some Medicare recipients.
Pharmaceutical companies are now actively exploring adjunct therapies to pair with GLP-1s to protect or maintain muscle, with most activity clustered around the myostatin/TGF-beta pathway, leaving room for novel targets and molecules, said CTO Tamar Eigler-Hirsh, PhD.
“We see a blue ocean of opportunity here because there aren’t any really groundbreaking novel targets and molecules out there right now.”
The business model
Through its human skeletal muscle tissue cultivation platform, ProFuse Technology can screen 10,000+ molecules a week to identify promising ingredients or therapeutics, said CEO Guy Nevo Michrowski.
For supplements, ProFuse is screening hundreds of GRAS molecules already approved for food use and testing combinations it could commercialize through food and nutrition partners, said Michrowski, noting that Nestlé and Danone are already developing muscle-preserving products for GLP-1 users.
In pharma, the model could resemble discovery-platform deals involving R&D payments, milestones, royalties, or eventual acquisition if candidates progress far enough, he said.
In the first instance, ProFuse will identify and validate candidates and expects to develop compounds to the lead stage, including in vivo validation in mouse models, before handing them off to pharma partners.
ProFuse began screening in early 2026 and has already identified some promising dietary supplement combinations moving toward further validation, as well as early drug candidates, although the latter remain on a much longer development path, said Michrowski.
Real-time tracking
While drug companies have developed their own in-vitro models to test promising candidates for muscle health products, the human muscle fibers created by ProFuse demonstrate a significantly higher level of maturity, which leads to the generation of more biologically relevant muscle tissue, more quickly, said Eigler-Hirsh.
“Growing mature muscle tissue in the lab is not easy and the muscle tissue we produce is really better than anything that can currently be made in the life sciences space, where they typically use mouse cell lines for this kind of testing, which have their limitations.
“With mature muscle fibers, we can model muscle diseases and muscle atrophy, plus we’ve also engineered human cell lines to express specific reporters associated with biomarkers that are increased with these disease conditions. This means we can track muscle maturation, stress, wasting, and recovery in-vitro in real time.”
Testing muscle functionality as well as growth
As ProFuse can grow intact muscle fiber in between pillars in a three-dimensional (3D) space, it can also measure muscle functionality, she said.
“We can stimulate these muscle bundles with electronic pulses and measure how much contractile force they have, because we don’t just want to show muscle growth, but whether that muscle growth translates into improved functionality. Do they contract better? Do they have more power?”
She added: “Drug companies right now don’t have effective high throughput screening systems for muscle. They take simple 2D systems, find a target that they like, develop a drug for that specific target, and often jump very quickly into an in vivo [animal] model.”
ProFuse’s tech enables more effective screening of potential candidates via in vitro systems before they move into more costly animal studies, she said. “We believe this will increase the chance of success of getting a muscle targeting drug into the clinic.”
Separately, she said, there is also “a huge push from regulators to promote NAMS [New Approach Methodologies] to take the focus away from using animal models for drug discovery and toxicology. They want to promote the use of in vitro systems, organoids, and high throughput screening on human cells, and our discovery platform is very much aligned with that.”
Cultivated meat: a long-term play
ProFuse Technology’s work on cell lines and media supplements for cultivated meat is still proceeding, said Michrowski, but it will not generate returns quickly enough to keep ProFuse in business in the short and medium term.
“It’s probably going to be at least 10 years before there’s going to be a market that can [sustain a company providing enabling tech for cultivated meat].”
However, Eigler-Hirsh noted that any GRAS supplement combinations that enhance muscle production could feed back into cultivated meat applications.
Further reading:
UC Davis launches Food & Health Angels to back foodtech startups as GLP-1 ‘tsunami’ approaches
🎥 Tufts MD on GLP-1 and the protein obsession: ‘I worry we might be missing the mark’
Evolv launches peptide that engages GLP-1 receptors as new ‘biomimetics’ category emerges
The post Exclusive: ProFuse Technology raises $1.5m to tackle muscle loss in the GLP-1 era appeared first on AgFunderNews.
