Biotech startup Vale Biolabs has received €164,000 (CHF 150,000) in funding from Venture Kick. The company will use the funding to improve its platform for studying brain diseases and testing potential treatments.
Founded by Ilaria Incaviglia, Angeliki Damilou, Daniel Medina Cano and Theodoulos Rodosthenous, Vale Biolabs combines lab-grown human brain tissue, automation and AI technology. Its platform helps researchers understand how the human brain responds to different drugs and supports the development of new treatments.
Developing treatments for brain diseases is still difficult. One major challenge is that researchers often use animals to test new drugs before human trials. However, animal brains and human brains are different, so test results may not always show how a treatment will work in people. This can lead to failures in clinical trials, higher research costs and delays in developing new medicines.
Vale Biolabs aims to solve this problem by creating small lab-grown models of human brain tissue, known as brain organoids. These models copy some of the features of the human brain and allow researchers to study how it works and responds to potential treatments.
The company uses automated technology to monitor these brain models over time. It studies changes in their structure, activity and molecular responses before and after different treatments are tested.
The information collected from these tests is then used to train AI models. These models help researchers study brain development, diseases that affect the brain over time and healthy brain ageing. The platform also allows drug developers to test potential treatments on human brain tissue at an earlier stage of research.
Vale Biolabs’ technology could support research into several neurological conditions, including rare brain disorders, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. It could also help researchers identify promising treatments earlier, reduce development costs and speed up the process of developing new medicines.
The funding from Venture Kick will help Vale Biolabs further develop its automated platform and expand its human brain tissue models. The company will also collect more data to train and test its AI models and build partnerships with research institutions and industry players.
