Chip-Man Technologies raises €1.4m to advance Cell-IQ platform

Chip-Man Technologies has completed a first round funding of €1.4m 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, chairman, Chip-Man: '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 the development of a strong pipeline of innovative products.'

In 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 recognize and record cellular change, and to output these results as real time moving images and simple multi-parameter graphics. Juha Korpinen, ceo, Chip-Man Technologies, said: '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.'

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 $500m, and is growing at a rate of 30% per annum.

Early feedback from trial sites has also demonstrated Cell-IQ's widespread applications. The system has been shown to greatly enhance the knowledge gained from cell based experimentation; studies on disease progression; and pharmacological profiling of chemicals, and is able to follow the effects of potential combination therapies.