Amazec Photonics awarded €1.5 million for PIC-based medical tech
The seed funding will be used to develop accurate and
minimally invasive devices for cardiovascular monitoring and diagnosis, with
clinical trials beginning this year
Amazec Photonics, a company focused on using integrated photonics to advance medical technology, has secured a €1.5 million seed round to develop its diagnosis devices.
The round was led by PhotonDelta – an accelerator and ecosystem of photonic chip technology organisations – with several private investors also contributing. The funding will be used to develop devices for clinical trials.
Cardiovascular diseases are the world’s leading cause of death, accounting for 19 million deaths per year. This is in part due to the difficulty in diagnosing conditions, leading to delays in treatment. Amazec says its solution – an easy-to-use cardiovascular monitoring tool – is a huge step forward, enabling much earlier and much more accurate diagnosis for minimal costs and complexity.
Existing solutions are complex, invasive, and often inaccurate. The most common technique to measure cardiac output is called thermodilution, which involves injecting a known volume of liquid upstream of the heart and then measuring temperature changes downstream through specialised catheters inserted into the patient. This has several drawbacks, including an inability to be used reliably during routine examination, large variation between measurements, a lack of sensitivity, and high costs. Consequently, it often leads to late or misdiagnosis, severely impacting the outlook for patients.
According to Amazec, its new solution uses photonics-based technology to measure temperature changes to an unprecedented precision of 0.0001 degrees Celsius, compared to current accuracy of 0.01 degrees Celsius. The monitoring device is external, meaning there is no need to insert catheters. The company also says that measurements can be made in real time, improving reliability compared with current methods, which use a single measurement.
Pim Kat, CEO of Amazec Photonics, said: “The number of people suffering from cardiovascular diseases has risen by 93 percent over the past 25 years and now impacts an estimated 550 million patients worldwide. Many of these people will die or suffer poor health outcomes because the tools we have to diagnose them simply aren’t good enough. Our solution can make a real difference because, not only does it vastly improve the accuracy of testing for cardiovascular disease, it is also much less invasive and simpler to use. This will substantially reduce costs and open the door to many more people being tested much more regularly.
“With this funding round we will be able to build ten prototypes and undertake extensive clinical trials with the intention of producing and selling devices across the EU by 2028.”
Laurens Weers, CFO of PhotonDelta, said: “Amazec has leveraged the power of photonics to create a device that can make a profound impact on the world. Cardiovascular disease is one of the biggest health challenges we face and better diagnosis can be the key to saving millions of lives. We’re very proud to be a part of Amazec’s journey - we believe it has the capacity to become one of Europe’s most important medtechs and a standard bearer for a new generation of photonics-based technology.”
PhotonDelta’s investment in Amazec Photonics is the latest step in the organisation’s goal to create a world-leading photonics industry in the Netherlands. PhotonDelta aims to help build 200 startups, create new applications for photonic chips and develop infrastructure and talent.
Amazec will begin clinical trials of its device at Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven this year, with an expansion to three other hospitals planned in 2025.
