Moleculent, a Stockholm-based company focused on advancing the spatial mapping of cell-cell communication, has secured a significant milestone with the closing of its oversubscribed $26 million Series A financing round. This round was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners and Eir Ventures, with participation from existing investors. The funding will support Moleculent’s innovative functional biology platform, which enables the detection and profiling of cell-cell interactions directly within tissue environments. Moleculent announced key appointments to its leadership team. Patrick Weiss from ARCH Venture Partners has been appointed Chairman of the Board, while Sean Kendall from ARCH and Magnus Persson from Eir Ventures have joined the company’s Board of Directors.
Moleculent’s functional biology platform detects cell-cell interactions and profiles their communication directly within their tissue environment. This novel approach allows scientists to see how healthy cells function and how diseased cells differ at a complex, networked level. A complete picture of the cell-cell communication in a tumor, for example, offers a practical understanding of the signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms involved in drug response. Studying cell-cell interactions between many different receptors and ligands, in a tissue context, represents a paradigm shift in understanding biological systems by enabling scientists to see a more comprehensive picture and to decode the cell-cell conversations and disease pathways.
“Analysis of DNA, as well as RNA and protein expression inform us about the building blocks of a cell but do not directly measure how cells are working together. Understanding cell-cell communication networks in tissues has the potential to bring us into a new era of understanding functional biology and human disorders,” said Olle Ericsson, PhD, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Moleculent. “The Moleculent platform has been designed to allow scientists to uncover radical new insights into the cellular level of human biology and pathology. We are very happy to partner with ARCH Venture Partners and Eir Ventures to bring this enabling platform to the scientific community.”
Moleculent is led by a team of industry veterans with expertise in developing and globally commercializing life science tools at leading companies including Halo Genomics (acquired by Agilent), Vanadis Diagnostics (acquired by Perkin Elmer), and Spatial Transcriptomics (acquired by 10x Genomics).
“Moleculent will enable scientists to decipher this communication to better understand functional human biology,” says Patrick Weiss, ARCH Venture Partners. “Spatial mapping technologies transformed our understanding of cellular neighborhoods, and the next frontier is to measure the critical communications between networks of individual cells. Moleculent will enable scientists to decipher this communication to better understand functional human biology. I am honored to chair the Moleculent Board and look forward to working with this exceptional team of experienced entrepreneurs and technology developers to change how we understand and diagnose disease in the coming decade.”
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