Image credits: iLoF
Oxford-based iLoF, a digital health company, announced on Thursday that it has secured $4.1M (approximately €4M) in a Seed round of funding led by Faber.
US-based M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, Quiet Capital, EU-based Lunar Ventures, Alter Venture Partners, re.Mind Capital, and Fluxunit, and angel investor Charlie Songhurst also participated in the round.
In addition to the $4.1M, the company also secured a $900K (approximately €888K) grant from ERDF. The company has raised $8M (approximately €7.9M) in funding to date.
Fund utilisation
The company says the funding will accelerate ongoing engagements with global corporations in the Pharmaceutical, Biotech, and Clinical space to fast-track current and future pilots.
The company plans to hire 20 people internationally across physics, data science, biology, and product management profiles.
iLoF: What you need to know
Founded by Mehak Mumtaz and Luis Valente, iLoF is pioneering an AI platform to accelerate the future of personalised drug discovery and development.
The company was formed while participating in EIT Health‘s Wild Card programme and accelerated at the Oxford Foundry.
Luis Valente, co-founder and CEO of iLoF, says, “For hundreds of years, treatments have been developed with the assumption they will work for everyone. However, each person is different, and for many severe diseases such as Alzheimer’s, multiple factors can contribute to the effectiveness of a treatment on a given patient.”
Valente continues, “This means millions of patients live without access to an effective, disease-modifying treatment – which sparked the vision behind iLoF. We collect vast amounts of data to create digital twins of biological profiles and disease subtypes, which we store in our digital library. Different patient profiles can be selected and screened using our platform to speed up the development of effective and personalised treatments while enabling humane, patient-centric clinical trials.”
Through advanced AI and Photonics, iLoF collects massive amounts of data to build a digital library of biomarkers and biological profiles, enabling biotechs and pharmaceutical companies to make clinical trials faster, cheaper, and patient-centric.
Mehak Mumtaz, co-founder and COO, of iLoF says, “Our ultimate vision is to go from a next-generation bioinformatics platform to a breakthrough disease screening one. Moving from supporting researchers and scientists to directly helping patients worldwide will vastly deepen our understanding of diseases and help physicians detect the world’s more severe and impactful diseases, such as Ovarian Cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease.”
The UK company worked with St. John’s Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine in Porto to accurately distinguish COVID-19 patients based on their likelihood of ICU admission, allowing hospitals to manage critical resources more effectively.
Currently, the iLoF team consists of 20 international scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors.
Recently, the company hired Alex Turpin as Head of BioSignal and Analytics. Turpin is an experienced physicist who led projects at the interface of AI, Data Science, and Photonics in world-class European institutions.
Sofia Santos, Partner at Faber, adds, “iLoF has the potential to positively impact millions of patients around the globe and become an integral part of the $500B global personalised medicine market. Its unique combination of photonics and artificial intelligence can directly impact the fast-growing AI in Drug Discovery Market and transform the diagnosis, staging, and triage of a myriad of diseases, progressively moving healthcare from a central hospital based-approach into a low-cost, distributed patient-driven approach.”
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