MONCYTE Health diagnostics, a Finnish firm developing new technology to optimise treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease, has closed a €1m seed round.
Its technology is designed to help clinicians select more effective personalised treatments for patients with high cholesterol.
Cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death worldwide, with high cholesterol being one of most important risk factors of the disease.
High blood cholesterol can lead to the formation of atherosclerotic plaques, which are fat deposits in arterial walls that can block the blood flow and lead to heart attack and stroke. Currently, a significant proportion of high-risk patients do not achieve optimal blood cholesterol levels and remain at elevated risk for cardiovascular disease.
MONCYTE’s technology can quantify individual differences in cellular lipid uptake and storage which contribute to high blood cholesterol and the effectiveness of common lipid-lowering drugs.
The readouts are derived from white blood cells, including monocytes, which play key roles in atherosclerotic plaque formation and inflammation, linking directly to cardiovascular risk.
Rather than quantify biomarkers which are present in blood, MONCYTE quantifies the cellular processes that affect the biomarkers. This insight provides the possibility to predict an optimal treatment strategy and to overcome current approaches of trying out different medications over time.
Precisely quantifying these individual differences enables personalised treatment strategies in combination with risk assessment which can help patients more effectively achieve optimal blood cholesterol levels faster, and thereby reduce the risk for cardiovascular disease.
The technology also provides insight for pharmaceutical companies about how novel lipid-lowering drugs influence the cellular processes contributing to cardiovascular risk.
Its seed funding round was led by Finnish venture capital investors Inventure, Almaral, and Athensmed and included funding from University of Helsinki Funds, private European investors, and a grant from Business Finland.
Tamara Alagirova, CEO and co-founder at MONCYTE Health, says: “Over 1.5 billion people world-wide are affected by high cholesterol. Our technology focuses on how cholesterol is transported and processed in human cells, and since the most important cholesterol-lowering treatments function at the cellular level, this type of technology is essential to disease understanding and identifying opportunities for developing novel drugs and personalised therapies for high cholesterol.
“We believe that personalised approaches for more effective lipid-lowering therapy and better insights into how immune cells accelerate plaque development can prevent heart attack and stroke more effectively.”
MONCYTE Health’s technology is significantly different from other diagnostic tests. Rather than quantify biomarkers which are present in blood, MONCYTE Health quantifies the cellular processes that affect the biomarkers. This unique insight provides the possibility to predict an optimal treatment strategy and to overcome current approaches of trying out different medications over time.
