iLoF (Intelligent Lab on Fiber), a startup which is working on a patented cloud-based library of ‘disease fingerprints’, just secured €870K of additional funding from Microsoft’s venture fund M12 and Mayfield.
Founded in 2019, iLoF created a disruptive platform technology, which detects nanoscale biomolecules in blood creating accurate optical ‘fingerprints’ of a patient’s phenotype and stage of disease. This way, the startup is improving screening processes, speeding up drug discovery for complex diseases like Alzheimer’s, and shining a light on COVID-19 infection.
Scouted from female-led companies from all over the globe, iLoF was the Global Deep Tech winner of M12, Mayfield and Melinda Gates’ Female Founders Competition, and has thus secured an important investment in their mission to enable a new era of personalized medicine. With aspirations far beyond Alzheimer’s, this investment is the second round of funding for iLoF in the last 12 months, after securing €2 million in 2019 from EIT Health.
Tamara Steffens, Managing Director at M12, stated: “We are so excited to name iLoF a winner of the Female Founders Competition and invest $1 million alongside Mayfield. iLoF’s technology promises to create effective treatments tailored for the individual, which will change healthcare trajectories for millions of people living with complex disorders. Their mission is humbling, and we are thrilled to support this company with our investment and as a board observer.”
Currently engaged with leading Biotechs, Pharmas and Hospitals, the company is capturing both individual nano-sized biomarkers and biological profiles of patients correlated with various heterogeneous diseases in their cloud-based library.
The agnostic, label-free nature of the platform allows greater flexibility in clinical trial design. By conveniently identifying suitable patients for clinical trials and fast-tracking the drug discovery process for currently incurable complex and heterogenous diseases, iLoF is opening the doors to new possibilities in personalised medicine – including Alzheimer’s.
So far, the search for a disease-modifying therapy to treat Alzheimer’s remains elusive. In the past two decades, more than 400 clinical trials have failed, many due to difficulties related with invasive screening methods, challenges identifying suitable patients, and a need for tailored treatments for each biological profile.
iLoF’s patented non-invasive platform aims to tackle these pains while offering pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies a significant cut on the cost and time of trials.
In fact, just last year iLoF published the use of the disruptive platform to detect and identify different types of gastric cancer cells in patients, aiming to enable a ‘stratification’ process which helps doctors to determine the most appropriate treatments. Recently, the startup also responded to the challenge of their clinical partners and is adapting the platform to forecast the clinical evolution of COVID-19 infected patients while in Hospital-care.
Luis Valente, CEO at iLoF, commented: “We are on a mission to enable a new era of personalized medicine, by helping the industry develop, choose and democratize personalised treatments for patients all around the world. Our focus is to provide non-invasive tools that make the drug development experience more humane and convenient for the patients, while drastically making the whole process more efficient and flexible for the industry”
