About
Better human models, made routine.
PEARL exists to make human organoids reliable enough to base decisions on.
01Mission
Drug discovery is only as good as the model it is built on.
We want researchers to be able to run an experiment in human three-dimensional tissue and trust that the difference they measure came from their compound.
That is an engineering problem as much as a biological one. Organoids became scientifically interesting long before they became dependable, and the gap between the two is where PEARL works: standardising how the tissue is produced, handled and read out, so the model becomes infrastructure rather than an experiment in its own right.
02Company
Twelve years on, the field still has not caught up.
PEARL is not a new idea looking for a method. It is a method, published years ago, that the field never industrialised.
2013
At the Max Planck Institute in Münster: a way of deriving human neural progenitors using only small molecules, published in PLOS ONE. An ERC grant and a group leader position follow, and over the next years the automation grows up around the biology.
2020
The complete workflow (seeding, patterning, fixation, clearing and imaging, none of it by hand) is published in eLife.
2021
Further applications published, in toxicity screening and in AI-assisted analysis. The work is recognised with the German Federal Animal Welfare Research Award.
2021 – 2025
The model grows up. Patterning is carried beyond midbrain into forebrain organoids, and tumour cells are combined with that tissue in assembloids: a different biology inside the same automation. The work matures into two papers in 2025, in Cancer Communications and in Nature Communications.
In parallel, Jan Bruder consults on 3D biology and imaging for pharma and biotech: the same field, seen from the buyer’s side of the table. What becomes obvious there is that almost nothing has moved. Labs are still building organoids by hand, years after a working automated alternative was published and left sitting in the open literature.
Since 2025
Supported by an EXIST grant and based at the REACH start-up incubator in Münster.
PEARL exists to close that gap: to turn a published method into something a pharmaceutical team can order and rely on.
1) The full institute name: your read deck says "MPI für Biomedizin in Münster", so this page says "the Max Planck Institute in Münster". 2) Which EXIST programme, and whose the ERC grant was. Also decide whether the 2021 Federal Animal Welfare Research Award should stay here: it was awarded to Jan personally, but it supports the animal-free positioning better than anything else on the site.
03Team
The people behind the platform.
Three founders covering the science, the commercial side and the lab.
Dr. Jan M. Bruder
Co-CEO & CSO
Dr. Jasper Kläver
Co-CEO & CBO
Dr. Bente Winkler
COO & Head of Lab
04Scientific foundation
Grounded in published work.
The organoid and automation methods behind PEARL were developed in an academic research setting and published before they became a platform.
The fully automated high-throughput workflow for chemical screening in human midbrain organoids was described in eLife in 2020, and the small-molecule neural progenitor cells the organoids are grown from in PLOS ONE in 2013. Since then the same approach has been carried into toxicity screening, oncology and mechanism-of-action work, each in a peer-reviewed journal.
Two patent families cover the technology: automated organoid production and analysis (WO2020053257A1), and the use of iPSC-derived smNPCs (WO2013104752A1).
Name the research group and institution the technology originates from, and state whether PEARL owns or licenses each patent family, and its current status (filed, granted, in which jurisdictions). Investors will check both.
Interested in working with PEARL?
Tell us what you are trying to measure. We will tell you honestly whether our organoids are the right model for it.