Vienna-based Aitiologic has raised €6.4m in an oversubscribed seed round to advance a liquid biopsy platform that aims to identify women at increased risk of preeclampsia during the first trimester of pregnancy.
The round was co-led by European health investors Heal Capital and Ananda Impact Ventures, with existing investors PUSH VC and LANA Ventures also participating. Gordon Sanghera, co-founder and former CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, invested in the round and has joined Aitiologic’s advisory board.
Founded by Andreas Posch, Aitiologic is developing Aitios, a liquid biopsy platform that uses AI to analyse DNA circulating in the blood and identify biological changes in specific tissues.
Its first application is preeclampsia risk assessment – and rather than requiring a separate test, Aitiologic is developing the technology to work from the same first-trimester blood sample already used for non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT).
The aim is to extract additional information about maternal and placental health from that existing blood draw, potentially identifying women at increased risk earlier in pregnancy and allowing preventive treatment and closer monitoring.
The approach also reflects a wider shift in diagnostics towards extracting more clinical information from samples and tests already embedded in routine care.
“Preeclampsia is a compelling first application because the unmet need for early risk prediction is significant and the clinical care pathway already exists,” said Posch.
Aitiologic has already published clinical data on the approach and is now running a large-scale validation study involving more than 1,000 pregnancies. The financing will support that study, alongside regulated product development of the platform.
The study, conducted with the Fetal Medicine Foundation, is designed to validate earlier feasibility work with Professor Kypros Nicolaides and the Fetal Medicine Research Institute, which found that the approach could stratify risk for both preterm and term preeclampsia from a first-trimester blood draw.
Aitiologic has also appointed obstetrician-gynaecologist Rebecca Ertl as chief medical officer as it moves the technology towards clinical use. The company says it is beginning to explore whether the same blood draw could provide earlier insights into other maternal health conditions, including gestational diabetes.
Women’s health as a starting point
Longer term, Aitiologic plans to apply its tissue-resolved liquid biopsy technology to areas including earlier disease detection, patient stratification, therapeutic response and longitudinal monitoring.
That makes preeclampsia not just a first product, but a proving ground for a potentially much broader precision medicine platform.
“Women’s health is a perfect starting point,” said Bernd Klosterkemper, partner at Ananda Impact Ventures, pointing to the potential to use the same platform across additional applications.
Aitios is currently under development and has not yet been approved for clinical use.
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Using the existing NIPT blood draw could reduce practical friction, but the 1,000-pregnancy study will need to show how performance differs for term and preterm preeclampsia. What happens after a high risk result matters just as much. Without a clear care pathway, extracting more information from the same sample may create uncertainty instead of useful lead time.