The Estonian health technology company Antegenes has raised €2.3 million in funding to bring its genetic tests for personalised cancer prevention into wider use in health care, scale the team and expand to new foreign markets.
Funding was received from investors, Enterprise Estonia and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
Antegenes’ genetic tests assess patient’s personal cancer risks and include clinical recommendations for further personalised cancer prevention.
“Tests are based on innovative polygenic risk score technology which helps clarify individual’s genetic predispositions to cancer. It therefore allows for more accurate prevention and early detection measures – crucial in the fight with cancer. The tests are currently used to determine the genetic risk to four cancers: breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer and melanoma,” the company said in a statement.
It raised €1.6 million from investors in seed round, which was led by Pipedrive co-founder Timo Rein, Pipedrive’s first investor Peep Vain and entrepreneurs Aare Kurist and Andreas Henn Otsmaa. In addition, other Estonian investors and entrepreneurs participated in the round. The financing round was advised by investment banking company Keystone Advisers and law firm Sorainen.
Bringing personalised cancer prevention into wider use
“The investments make it possible to bring personalised cancer prevention into wider use in health care, including in new markets. In addition to Estonia and the United Kingdom, we have started operations in Sweden, Norway, Portugal and Spain. In the coming months we will also enter the German market,” Dr Peeter Padrik, the founder and CEO of Antegenes, said in a statement.
In addition, the company has received two grants to bring research-intensive innovation to international health care. The first is the BRIGHT project, which is financed with €2.28 million by EIT Health, of which €500,000 is a grant. At the centre of the project is Antegenes and the breast cancer genetic risk test AnteBC.
The second grant is through the Norway Grants Green ICT programme, which supports business cooperation between Estonia and Norway. The goal of the €200,000 funding is to implement the breast cancer genetic risk test AnteBC as part of a breast cancer screening routine in Norway.
Antegenes is an Estonian health technology company and medical laboratory founded in 2018 with a goal to develop and implement advanced genetic tests based on polygenic risk scores technology for precision prevention of major complex diseases.
