The 2010 Venture Kick winner ProteoMediX Raises CHF 5 million in Financing Round

The round was led by Altos Venture (Allschwil, Switzerland), a Swiss venture capital firm chaired by Dr. Walter Fischli (co-founder of Actelion), that is investing in carefully selected hightech start-ups. All existing investors participated in this round, including Zürcher Kantonalbank and several private investors experienced in life science investments. The new funding brings the total capital raised by ProteoMediX to date close to CHF 12 million (€ 11 million).

The new funds will enable ProteoMediX to continue the development of its lead product for prostate cancer diagnosis into a final CE-certified IVD product and gather additional clinical data. The test is intended as an aid in the detection of prostate cancer, i.e. to inform men with elevated PSA (prostate specific antigen) and/or suspicious DRE (digital rectal examination), about the likelihood of having a cancer positive biopsy.

The goal is to significantly reduce unneeded prostate biopsies (today, more than 70% of biopsies are negative). The promising results of a clinical study performed earlier this year showed that ProteoMediX’ test has the potential to reduce negative prostate biopsies by up to 60%. In addition, the new funding will allow ProteoMediX to continue development of a follow-on product for the prognosis of prostate cancer.

Dr. Ralph Schiess, CEO and co-founder commented: “We are delighted to have received continuous support and additional funds that will enable us to advance our first test for the reduction of negative prostate biopsies towards a market introduction in Europe”. “We are pleased that we received such a strong commitment from our existing investors. This is a very strong sign of confidence in our company and recognizes the progress we made”, said Christian Brühlmann, CFO and co-founder of ProteoMediX.



About ProteoMedix
ProteoMediX won the Venture Kick final in 2010. The diagnostic company was founded in March 2010 as a spin-off company from ETH Zurich. ProteoMediX is also number 12 on the TOP100 Best Swiss Startups ranking of 2015.

They enables personalized medicine by developing non-invasive diagnostic tests to detect and assess the prognosis of cancer, as well as to match patients with safer and more effective therapies. The first products are focusing on prostate cancer, the most frequently diagnosed cancer in men, where neither the detection nor the effective treatment is currently guaranteed. ProteoMediX owns the exclusive commercial rights on a set of protein-based biomarkers that were discovered with state-of-the-art proteomics technology developed at the ETH Zurich. These biomarkers are directly linked to the origin of cancer on a molecular level and allow to capture the complexity of the disease by combining multiple biomarkers. A combination of these showed superior results for the accurate diagnosis of prostate cancer when compared to the current standard PSA test in several clinical studies.