Constellate Proteomics brings antibody quality into focus five weeks earlier

About Constellate Proteomics

When developing antibody medicines, choosing the right cells to produce them is a decision with lasting consequences. Those cells could manufacture the medicine for its entire commercial life. Yet developers often have to wait weeks before they can properly assess the quality of what those cells produce.

Carlos, Dennis and Arian founded Constellate Proteomics to bring that insight forward. Part of imec.istart’s Belgium Summer 2026 cohort, the team is helping developers make quality an early selection criterion.

From week six to week one

The technology originated in Prof. Chirlmin Joo’s single-molecule biophysics lab at TU Delft, where Carlos and his colleagues invented the core measurement method.

Conventional quality testing requires micrograms of antibody material. Growing enough can take around six weeks. In the meantime, developers have to make important decisions without that quality data, adding precautions, delays and costs along the way.

Constellate measures antibody quality using a single picogram of material — one trillionth of a gram. By working with such small quantities, the team can help developers identify promising antibody-producing cells much earlier.

In the founders’ words: “Quality becomes a selection criterion in week one instead of a verdict in week six.”

A method meets its market

Carlos had spent several years exploring how his technology could be used in antibody development before securing funding for market research.

Dennis knew the problem from the other side of the lab bench. During his master’s at the LUMC Centre for Proteomics and Metabolomics, he analysed antibodies himself and experienced the wait for enough material to test.

Carlos had a method that could remove that wait. Dennis understood how to explain its value to the people facing it. Arian brought experience in building biotech companies, completing the founding team.

During customer interviews, that combination clicked: Dennis could practically finish prospective customers’ sentences.

Two patents and international pilots

Constellate has licensed two core patents  from TU Delft and won the Academic Startup Competition. The team is already running pilot projects with companies in China and Switzerland, testing the technology on customers’ antibodies.

There is also a waiting list of interested companies in Germany, Sweden, Spain and the United States, with five additional pilots ready to start. Meanwhile, the founders have secured half of their pre-seed funding round.

The next commercial milestone is turning those pilots into paid projects. As investors have consistently reminded them: “Paying customers are the milestone that matters most.”

From a lab setup to a customer-ready device

Today, Constellate can analyse around 100 samples a day. Over the next year, the team aims to increase that capacity to more than 1,000 and convert three to five pilots into paying projects.

They are also building their first compact prototype, along with a disposable cartridge for each test. The goal is to bring the device into customers’ labs and demonstrate it on-site.

That brings a new challenge: turning a manual setup that works in the founders’ hands into an instrument that works just as reliably in someone else’s.

Alongside the hardware development, the team is adding tests for two more quality characteristics to broaden the platform’s early-stage testing capabilities. Together, these steps should prepare Constellate for a planned €1.9 million funding round in 2027.

Why imec.istart, and why Belgium?

With imec.istart’s support, the Delft-based team will soon open a second location at BioVille in Diepenbeek, bringing them closer to customers across Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. They also see potential to work with imec on the hardware, drawing on its technology and network to turn a full lab setup into a compact tabletop device.