Launched in June 2024, the FASS (Fast and Accurate Solubility for Sustainability) project, funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the Horizon Europe EIC Transition programme, carries a strong ambition: to fundamentally transform the way pharmaceutical and chemical industries measure drug solubility and aggregation. 

The pharmaceutical industry facing the challenge of chemical compounds 

Solubility testing is a mandatory step for every chemical compound brought to market. Yet, the pharmaceutical industry has lacked a truly sustainable and efficient solution.
Current methods rely on a difficult trade-off: either fast but less accurate techniques, such as nephelometry, or highly accurate but time-consuming approaches, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). In both cases, these methods also require the use of large volumes of compounds and solvents, which are often costly and valuable.

A European alliance to transform solubility and aggregation measurement 

In this context, the European collaborative research and innovation project FASS aims to transform solubility and aggregation measurement in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries in a fast, sustainable, and high-performing way, thanks to a disruptive instrument dedicated to this analysis.

Led by EU-OPENSCREEN, the project brings together ORYL Photonics, FHNW and ALPhANOV, four partners from different countries. Beyond the technological ambition, FASS embodies the European spirit of open collaboration and sustainable innovation, contributing to the EU Green Deal objectives and strengthening the competitiveness of European life sciences. The collaboration across Germany, France, Switzerland and Spain anchored in a strong European research infrastructure and involving complementarily leading startup, academic, and technological center is a model of the kind of cross-border innovation Europe's EIC programme was designed to support. 

The FASS project is built around a breakthrough technology originating from EPFL, leveraging high-efficiency Second Harmonic Scattering (SHS) which is a non-destructive optical technique that simultaneously delivers speed, precision, and radical gains in sustainability. The instrument developed jointly by ORYL Photonics and ALPhANOV is compact, intuitive, and designed for seamless deployment in any pharmaceutical or biotech R&D laboratory.

Functional prototypes in real-world operating conditions

The FASS project is structured around three main objectives: 

At this stage (T0 + 23 months), the project is on track across all three objectives.

F1 instrument released in September 2025		Final checks of 2nd F1 instrument to be delivered to FHNW (November 2025)
The completion of the F1 prototype was successfully achieved by ORYL Photonics and ALPhANOV. This compact instrument, equipped with intuitive software, represents a major step forward in advancing the project's technological maturity, with a view to achieving TRL 6 validation and meeting objective 1. It has beed deployed at FHNW and is now routinely used by the EU-OPENSCREEN partner site at USC in Spain for validation and performance testing.		A few months later, in Decembre 2025, a second instrument was deployed at FHNW in Basel to accelerate the development of pharmaceutical applications. At the same time, the go-to-market strategy is gradually taking shake, informed by initial discussions with potential customers.

These advances are based both on intensive engineering work, with two successive cycles of optimization of the optomechanical and electronic designs, and on close collaboration among the partners. After several months of operation the instrument is now demonstrated to be reliable and met key performance targets:

• Delivers results for a full 984 well-plate in less than 15 minutes
• Measurement speed per date point in the range 10 ms - 1 s
• Requires only 2 µL of stock solution per solubility datapoint 

All of these results were made possible through the effective collaboration between consortium partners, facilitated by EU-OPENSCREEN's coordination and monitoring framefork.

This project has received funding from the European Union's HORIZON-EIC-2023-TRANSITION-01 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No. 101159068 and from the Swiss Confederation Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research EAER State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI.