Startup Vale Biolabs gets €164K from Venture Kick for a human brain organoid platform

Biotech startup Vale Biolabs has received €164,000 (CHF 150,000) from Venture Kick to advance its platform for studying brain diseases and evaluating potential treatments, Tech.eu reports tech.euTech.eutech.euOpen source ↗. The company was founded by Ilaria Incaviglia, Angeliki Damilou, Daniel Medina Cano and Theodoulos Rodosthenous. The founding team combines expertise in organoid neurobiology, automation, data science engineering and early-stage venture development.

Human brain organoids and automation

Vale Biolabs combines lab-grown human brain tissue, automation and predictive models to help researchers understand how the brain responds to drugs. The company is developing standardised human brain organoids, miniature tissue models that reproduce certain characteristics of the human brain.

With automation, the company monitors changes in these models over time. It analyses their structure, activity and molecular responses before and after exposure to potential treatments. The collected data is used to build predictive models for research into brain development, neurodegenerative diseases and healthy brain ageing.

The company aims to let drug developers test treatments on human brain tissue earlier in development. According to the company, this should help identify promising therapies and potential failures before they reach clinical trials.

The problem and the use of funds

Developing treatments for neurological disorders remains difficult, in part because preclinical research relies heavily on animal testing. Differences between animal and human biology make it hard to predict how drugs will perform in patients. This contributes to failures in clinical trials, higher development costs and delays for new therapies tech.euTech.eutech.euOpen source ↗.

The company says the technology could support research into a range of neurological conditions, including rare brain disorders and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. It also points to possible lower development costs and faster introduction of new treatments; these are stated aims, not demonstrated results.

The Venture Kick funding will support further development of the automated platform, expansion of the human brain organoid models and generation of datasets to train and validate the predictive models. It will also help the company advance collaborations with research and industry partners.