Switzerland-based Epiterna, a startup working on slow ageing, announced on Tuesday, August 1, that it has emerged from stealth mode and is actively progressing towards using life-extending science to create more time for pets and people.
The startup is backed by Stockholm-based Prima Materia, a company co-founded by Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, and Shakil Khan, an investor in Spotify. Previously, Ek invested in Neko Health, a health tech company that aims to create a healthcare system that can help people stay healthy through preventive measures and early detection.
According to the Sifted, Prima Materia has invested €10M in the Swiss company to help solve society’s most pressing problem – ageing.
Epiterna: Helping people and pets to live longer
Founded by Alejandro Ocampo and Kevin Perez as a spin-off of OcampoLab at the University of Lausanne, Epiterna aims to help pets and people live longer and healthier lives.
“This journey has been made possible by closely working with Pia Michel and the team at Prima Materia, whose aim is to help the most ambitious European entrepreneurs find technology solutions to society’s most difficult problems,” says Ocampo.
The company has developed a unique high-throughput platform to evaluate drugs and assess their effect on healthy lifespan.
The idea of extending a healthy lifespan emerged from scientific research, and Alejandro Ocampo, along with Kevin Perez, had been studying ageing for 15 years, exploring ways to slow down or reverse the process at the cellular and molecular level.
EPITERNA received guidance from strategic advisors, including experts like Dr. Matt Kaeberlein (Co-Director of The Dog Aging Project and CEO of Optispan), Dr. Richard Miller (Director of the Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at the University of Michigan and Principal Investigator at the Interventions Testing Program (ITP)), and Dr. Johan Auwerx (Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)), to support their team of researchers and engineers. They developed a screening platform capable of testing the effects of any medicine on the health and lifespan of multiple animals.
Initially, EPITERNA focused on evaluating approved medicines that veterinarians and doctors already prescribed for specific diseases in dogs, cats, and humans.
This approach ensured the safety, effectiveness, and accessibility of their therapies, as they aimed to make the products available soon to those who needed them.
Focusing on ageing instead age-related diseases
The company emphasised addressing ageing as the root cause of diseases and physical decline, rather than targeting individual age-related diseases.
Its research platform was designed to identify medicines that could safely extend lifespan and health span, the period free from disease.
EPITERNA’s platform evaluated medicines at the molecular and cellular levels in animal models, recognising that many ageing mechanisms were conserved across species.
“We have already assessed hundreds of medicines in smaller animals and more than a dozen in larger ones, validating promising candidates from the literature and identifying previously unknown leads,” says Ocampo.
Their efforts yielded promising candidates, and they worked to increase the throughput of their evaluations using automation and technology.
Starting clinical trial for dogs in 2024
Epiterna intends to start clinical trials for companion dogs in Europe in 2024.
“Importantly, we don’t view pets as simply a stepping-stone to evaluate medicines that could eventually work for people. We intend to initiate clinical trials for people before launching our first products for companion animals,” he adds.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/epiterna-exits-stealth-mode/
