Successful first private placement round will allow the company to fully launch its systems biology platform to the global cell biology research market, and develop new products
Chip-Man Technologies has completed a first round funding of euro1.4million with Aura Capital and Finnish Industry Investment for further development of its Cell-IQ systems biology platform.
MediTutor acted as financial advisors.
The funding follows the European debut of Cell-IQ at DDT Europe and, according to Pekka Sillanukee, Chip-Man chairman: "This successful first private placement round will allow the company to fully launch its Cell-IQ systems biology platform to the global cell biology research market and continue to develop our strong pipeline of innovative new products".
Cell-IQ aims to take a share of the growing demand for automated cell analysis tools in pharmaceutical and medical research.
The current market alone is estimated at around US$500 million and growing at 30% per annum.
In what is described as a major breakthrough, Cell-IQ enables real time monitoring of all morphological and physiological changes in cell lines, primary cells, co cultures and monolayer tissue models.
It achieves this by using artificial intelligence (AI) to control novel optics that automatically monitor and follow all the cells in a culture individually.
Through AI, the Cell-IQ software learns to recognise and record cellular change, to output these results as real time moving images and simple multi-parameter graphics.
"Most importantly, incorporating AI has removed the need for expensive and labour-intensive traditional end point kits, labels or dyes." says CEO Juha Korpinen, "Cell-IQ simply translates all the events from a continuous culture experiment into easily understood graphics.
"In addition it stores the recorded images for later interrogation, thus reducing the need for repeated costly experimentation".
Early feedback from trial sites has also demonstrated Cell-IQ's widespread applications, says the company.
The system has been shown to greatly enhance the knowledge gained from cell based experimentation, studies on disease progression and pharmacological profiling of chemicals, new drug candidates and following the effects of potential combination therapies.
