Gaurav Goyal, PhD, CEO of Nanolyze
Gaurav Goyal, PhD, CEO of Nanolyze
Gaurav Goyal, PhD CEO, Nanolyze Gothenburg, Sweden
Gaurav Goyal, PhD, CEO of Nanolyze
Biography
Gaurav Goyal is the CEO of Nanolyze, a Gothenburg-based deep-tech company developing waveguide-based optical imaging platforms for nanoparticle characterization. Born in India, he completed his PhD in Biomedical Engineering in the US, spent time in San Francisco's biotech startup world, and moved to Sweden in 2018 to join the Chalmers University ecosystem.
He was recruited to Nanolyze as a Scientific Business Development Manager and promoted to CEO. A central theme throughout his research and training has been nano-metrology, and that expertise is what drives how he approaches the work at Nanolyze — understanding where measurement gaps exist in the field, and what it takes to turn that into something useful, building with the focus and pragmatism that a resource-constrained startup demands.
Interview
NanoSphere: Tell us a bit about yourself—your background, journey, and what led you to where you are today.
Gaurav: I grew up in India with an early interest in both biology and engineering, which motivated me to study biotechnology as an undergrad. I then moved to South Korea for a masters in bioengineering, followed by a PhD in the US in biomedical engineering. After graduating, I spent time in San Francisco's biotech startup world, which fundamentally changed how I think about turning science into tools that people actually use. That environment forces you to be honest - does this work outside the lab, and does it solve a problem someone genuinely has?
After spending an amazing 10 years in South Korea and the US, I wanted to experience living in Europe. Through a chance meeting with a professor at Chalmers University of Technology, I landed in Gothenburg in 2018. Gothenburg, and specifically the Chalmers University ecosystem, is quietly one of the most serious environments in Europe for biosensor and optical physics research. That's where Nanolyze was founded, and that scientific foundation is still very much the core of what we do.
What keeps me here is something that has been central to my research and training since graduate school: nano-metrology, the precise measurement of things at the nanoscale. Our ability to engineer matter at the nanoscale has consistently outpaced our ability to observe it. We're building increasingly sophisticated nanostructures, for drug delivery, diagnostics, cell therapy, but the measurement tools to characterize how those structures actually behave in biological environments often haven't kept pace. That's the gap Nanolyze exists to close, and it's where having a deep nano-metrology background makes a difference.
NanoSphere: Nanolyze sits at the intersection of nanotechnology, measurement, and translational application. Looking back at your journey from fundamental research to leading a company, what were the specific or system-level gaps you encountered that convinced you existing tools were insufficient - and how did those gaps shape the core philosophy behind Nanolyze's technology?
Gaurav: The gap that shaped my thinking is not a subtle one, it’s a serious gap once you see it.
The dominant tools for nanoparticle characterization: dynamic light scattering, nanoparticle tracking analysis, electron microscopy - are genuinely useful, but they share a fundamental limitation: they offer physical characterization of nanoparticles in isolation from the native biological context. You get a size distribution, a zeta potential, a snapshot. What you don't get is a dynamic, real-time picture of what individual particles are doing at biological interfaces, under conditions that reflect what happens in a living system.
And the interface is exactly where everything important happens. When a lipid nanoparticle encounters a cell membrane, when it begins to release its cargo, when a nanoparticle interacts with a receptor or gets trafficked through an endosome—these are surface-mediated, kinetic events. Capturing them accurately requires new tools capable of probing and tracking interaction dynamics as they unfold—without fluorescent labels that would alter the very particles you're trying to observe.
That's the idea behind our waveguide platform. Light propagating through our planar waveguide generates an evanescent field that illuminates only the first ~100–200 nanometers above the chip surface. Within that field, you can image individual nanoparticles in real time, observe their interactions with surface-bound biological structures, and track kinetics - label-free, under native conditions.
The core philosophy is simple: the measurement method must respect biology. Label-free, real-time, surface-sensitive. Everything we build follows from that. If the measurement itself disturbs the system, or averages away the heterogeneity that matters, or only captures a static snapshot of a fundamentally dynamic process—then the data is answering a different question than the one you're actually asking.
NanoSphere: Nanoparticle uptake and release are increasingly central to drug delivery, diagnostics, and safety assessment, yet they are still treated as "black boxes" in many development pipelines. From your perspective, what are the downstream consenquences - scientific, regulatory, and ethical - of not being able to reliably measure these processes, and where do you see the greatest leverage for change?
Gaurav: The consequences cascade across the entire pipeline, and I think the field significantly underestimates how expensive this gap is.
Scientifically, the measurement gap means that formulation development is still largely empirical. You design a nanoparticle formulation, test it in animals, and observe whether it works—but without being able to see what's actually happening at the membrane level. You have hypotheses around what happens to the particles right from dosing to protein expression - particles interact with serum proteins, get taken up by the cells, end up in endosomes, mRNA escapes the endosomes and protein is expressed. As a nano-metrology scientist, I will call it fairy tale biology. We need to start asking: Are particles being taken up efficiently? Which particles in a heterogeneous population are releasing payload versus getting trapped in endosomes? How much does the surface chemistry matter, particle by particle? Without that resolution, you're iterating slowly on something you can't fully see. The field compensates with sheer experimental volume rather than mechanistic insight.
On the regulatory side, the situation is uncomfortable in a way that is rarely discussed openly. Agencies require characterization data, and companies provide it—but the methods used have known limitations that the entire community tacitly accepts. Submissions can therefore be built on measurements that appear rigorous but don't capture the functional behavior of nanoparticles in the relevant biological context. But this is the field working with the tools available, and it creates real risk: post-market safety signals with nanomedicines have sometimes emerged because biodistribution and cellular uptake behaviors weren't fully characterized at the design stage.
Ethically, I think the most honest framing is this: when a nanomedicine clinical trial fails due to insufficient efficacy, patients bear the risk of that trial based on a scientific promise we couldn't fully substantiate. The measurement gap is not just a technical inconvenience—it sits directly upstream of our ability to honestly predict clinical outcomes.
The greatest leverage for change is at the point of formulation development, not regulatory review. If developers can observe, in real time, what their nanoparticles are doing at biological interfaces during the design phase—before the asset is locked—they can make better decisions much earlier. The regulatory submission should be the documentation of a process that was already well understood. That's where better characterization tools have the highest impact-per-dollar on the eventual clinical result.
NanoSphere: If there’s one key message or insight you’d like to share with readers about the future of nanomedicine, what would it be?
Gaurav: "We have learned to engineer matter at the nanoscale with extraordinary precision. The next chapter of nanomedicine depends on learning to observe it with equal precision—in real time, label-free, in conditions that actually reflect the biology. For the field to fulfill its promise, we need to move beyond the black-box brute force approach. We need to tease out the mechanistic insights, unpack what actually happens at the biological interface, and build that understanding into how we design and develop these therapies."
Gaurav's references
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7357703255524556800/