Cyclana Bio, a biotechnology company pioneering tissue-level approaches to women’s health, today announced the close of a £5m pre-seed funding round, co-led by NfX and Eka VC, and including Cocoa VC, Wilbe, and Angel investors. The investment will enable Cyclana Bio to develop functional disease models and its platform, dedicated to revolutionising women’s health through tissue level therapeutics, starting with the discovery of treatments for endometriosis.
Endometriosis is a chronic and debilitating lifelong condition that affects 1 in 10 women worldwide. Despite its prevalence, the disease physiology of endometriosis remains poorly understood and treatment options remain limited. Cyclana Bio is addressing a need to better serve millions of women by developing physiologically relevant models and utilising AI-driven multi-scale data integration to enable the discovery of druggable targets to improve treatment outcomes.
Cyclana Bio has demonstrated the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in endometriosis, where dysregulation of the ECM causes inflammation and loss of tissue function. Until now, drug development strategies to treat endometriosis have focused on intracellular mechanisms, failing to target the interaction between cells and the ECM, and have resulted in sub-optimal treatment efficacy. The company is focused on building whole tissue models of disease, harnessing menstrual fluid, received from donations from an observational clinical trial, and lab-based modelling to uncover early biomarkers of disease and identify novel targets for drug development. Initially focused on endometriosis, Cyclana Bio’s whole tissue-based methodology represents a promising approach to address other underserved chronic inflammatory diseases that share similar tissue-level mechanisms.
