WildCard winner iLoF secures further $5M investment

Oxford and Porto-based leading digital health company Intelligent Lab on Fiber, otherwise known as “iLoF”, has received $5m in funding to accelerate its mission of democratising access to personalised medicine for millions of people living with complex diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The investment was led by Faber, with participation from Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Quiet Capital, Lunar Ventures, Alter Venture Partners, and Fluxunit. The seed funding will be used to accelerate the development of iLoF, progress further partnerships, and scale the team.

Initially backed by EIT Health, part of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, a body of the European Union, iLoF’s intelligent platform is collecting vast amounts of data to build a library of biological profiles, bringing together world-class physicists, biologists, and data scientists to deliver life-saving personalised treatments to patients faster.

Using cutting-edge optical lasers, the company first analyses blood samples from patients before using AI-powered technology to create a unique digital molecular profile of a patient. Patients’ digital profiles are then compared to iLoF’s cloud-based library of biological profiles in search of potential matches. Matches ultimately facilitate the development of personalised treatment, which informs patient monitoring, diagnosis, and screening plans.

With over $8M in funding to date, iLoF is well-equipped to implement its vision of cutting time and costs of recruiting patients for clinical trials. By helping to remove the barriers to the development of personalised, effective, and life-saving therapeutics, iLoF promises to usher in a new generation of personalised therapies and patient-centric treatment.

Luis Valente, Co-Founder and CEO of iLoF, said,

“For hundreds of years, treatments have been developed with the assumption they work for everyone. However, each person is different and for many severe diseases such as Alzheimer’s, there are multiple factors that can contribute to the effectiveness of a treatment on a given patient.”

“This means millions of patients currently live without access to an effective, disease-modifying treatment – which sparked the idea for iLoF. We collect data to create biological profiles of disease subtypes 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 patient-centric clinical trials.”

Mehak Mumtaz, Co-Founder and COO of iLoF, added,

“Our ultimate vision is to go from being the next-generation bioinformatics platform to a breakthrough disease screening platform. Moving from supporting researchers and scientists to have a deeper understanding of diseases to helping physicians detect the world’s more severe and impactful diseases.”

Consisting of 20 international scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors, the widely acclaimed iLoF team was initially formed during the EIT Health WildCard programme in 2019 – which provides world-class mentorship and training to innovators with life-changing ideas to improve healthcare. iLoF has also previously won EIT’s Jumpstarter pre-accelerator programme, which boosts innovation and entrepreneurship within Central-Eastern and Southern-European regions.

Jean Marc Bourez, CEO of EIT Health, said,

“We are thrilled about the news of iLoF’s well-deserved funding success. The company has come a long way since its inception at the EIT Health WildCard programme in 2019. With its grand vision to improve patient outcomes using pioneering technology, we couldn’t be prouder of our role in nurturing iLoF and we look forward to watching as the company continues to grow and transform the lives of patients living with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”

Currently, the company is hiring internationally across physics, data science, biology, and product management profiles.

For more information on iLoF click here. For more information on EIT Health’s Wild Card programme click here.