Finnish healthtech Nightingale teams up with Estonian state biobank

Finnish health-tech startup Nightingale Health and Estonian Biobank, a population-based biobank of the Institute of Genomics at the University of Tartu have unveiled a long-term strategic collaboration to support Biobank’s target to empower the entire population of Estonia with modern tools of personalized medicine to realize early disease prevention.

In the first phase of the collaboration, Nightingale’s proprietary blood-testing technology and its health data platform are utilised to provide complementary health insights to the 200,000 participants of Biobank to detect holistically disease risks and preventative needs of individuals.

“Nightingale’s belief is that empowering people with better health information enables better decisions on an individual level to prevent diseases,” said Teemu Suna, CEO of Nightingale.

“Bringing health benefits to participants, people and the entire society is the core purpose of biobanking. Bringing modern tools for returning health insights to the biobank participants strongly serves that purpose,” said Tõnu Esko, Head of Estonian Biobank Innovation Center, University of Tartu.

Nightingale’s proprietary highly accurate blood test is validated by regulatory approvals and by more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Nightingale operates as a private healthcare provider in Finland.

After completing the first phase, the aim is to take Nightingale’s health data platform into use in personal medicine initiatives across the world.

“Together the high scalability and low price point of Nightingale technology can be used to empower nations with better personal health insights, giving everyone better tools to stay healthy and prevent diseases,” said Suna.

“We are very excited to take our globally pioneering initiative forward together with Nightingale and continue our long-term efforts in bringing health benefits for the society through advancements in science and technology,” said Esko.

In December Nightingale said  Timo Soininen, co-founder and former CEO of Small Giant Games, has joined the company as Chairman at a time when Nightingale is now rapidly expanding the global commercial B2B and B2C operations of its health data platform as well as exploring the possibilities of an IPO in the coming months.

Nightingale’s health data platform is a unique combination of new blood-testing technology and an ability to use the blood-based data to detect future disease risks.

Nightingale — which has raised 24.5 million euros so far from investors — said it in December also that it has appointed Swedbank as the lead financial advisor to explore future financing options, including possibilities for an Initial Public Offering by listing the company’s shares on Nasdaq Helsinki First North.