Aug 1, 2022

UKHotViews Biotech startup iLoF (intelligent Lab on Fiber), has secured c.$5m (£4.1m) to help develop its intelligent drug development platform. The funding includes $4m in equity investment led by Faber, with additional participation from M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), Quiet Capital, Lunar Ventures, Alter Venture Partners, re.Mind Capital, Fluxunit, and angel investors. The company also secured an €880k grant from the European Regional Development Fund. The latest investment takes total funding to date to over $8m. The company, which has offices in Oxford, London, Porto and Lisbon, was founded by Luis Valente (CEO), Mehak Mumtaz (COO), and Paula Sampaio (CSO) in 2019. It was initially formed while participating in the EIT Health Wild Card programme; was part of the third cohort of companies supported by Oxford Foundry's Elevate programme ; and was one of thirteen companies chosen by Microsoft to join its AI for Social Impact programme last year. The company is using AI and photonics to create bio-digital twins of biological profiles and disease subtypes, which are stored in its cloud-based library with the aim of making clinical trials faster, cheaper and more patient-centric. It uses optical lasers to analyse blood samples, acquiring signals that can be processed using its AI technology to create a unique digital molecular profile that can be compared with other digital fingerprints. This information can then be used to develop personalised treatments. To date, the key focus for the technology has been in delivering a non-invasive way of stratifying patients for Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials, but it has also been used for forecasting COVID-19 disease severity, and for cancer subtype identification. The seed investment will be used by iLoF to help scale its operations, including hiring 20 new employees across the fields of physics, data science, biology, and product management. It intends to build on its existing partnerships with pharmaceutical, biotech, and clinical organisations with the aim of accelerating pilot studies. It will also invest in further development of the iLoF Platform as it seeks to position itself at the forefront of the new era of AI-enabled personalised patient care.