LongeVC investment in healthtech startup Melio’s rapid blood testing platform will improve longevity diagnostics – and quality of life.
LongeVC, a VC backing early-stage breakthrough technologies, announced today that it has invested in Melio, a health technology startup pioneering a groundbreaking platform for infectious disease diagnostics.
Longevity.Technology: While we might take every effort to improve our healthspan through diet, exercise, sleep and stress mitigation, avoiding infection can often come down to the luck of the draw. Infections can be persistent, leave long-term damage and impact healthspan and lifespan, and while there are various treatment options available, doctors often need to prescribe unnecessary and ineffective antibiotics due to limited diagnostic options – something that can spike the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
For infants, early-age antibiotic exposure can lead to a lifetime of ill health, affecting the health of the microbiome, contributing to asthma, autoimmune diseases and weight gain, and increasing the risk of metabolic disorders [1]. The depth of the problem is immense, according to LongeVC – for every 150 babies prescribed antibiotics, only one needs them. The focus on healthspan and longevity clearly can’t begin too early.
Melio’s diagnostics solution rapidly identifies bloodborne pathogens to eliminate unnecessary prescriptions; using AI, the platform evaluates each pathogen cell in a blood sample, and analyzes how its DNA unwinds, melts or denatures. By accelerating the diagnostics process, Melio disrupts current inefficient pathogen testing by breaking the “one-pathogen, one-probe” paradigm in diagnostics. Instead, by eliminating the detrimental overuse of antibiotics at birth, Melio aims to deliver actionable results through its novel testing technology and encourage healthy starts and better outcomes.
In addition, Melio’s platform technology is scalable to other disease indications, meaning we could see the longevity ecosystem benefit from with rapid, in-house and same-day results, and allowing physicians to deliver precise treatment protocols. Melio’s platform’s diagnostic capabilities that are scalable “over the air” with universal probes, and can be deployed without hardware changes. By eliminating the time-consuming step of culturing microbes prior to identification – which currently takes three days – Melio hopes to bring about a speed and ease of diagnosis that will drastically improve the standard of care.
“Diagnostics are an integral component of longevity care,” Garri Zmudze, co-founder and managing partner of LongeVC, said. “Melio’s technology makes it faster and easier for physicians to deliver personalized and effective treatments. We are thrilled to back their game-changing work.”
“Longevity truly starts at day one,” Professor Tzipi Strauss, LongeVC advisory board member and neonatologist, said. “Physicians need better ways to diagnose and treat infants. Melio will improve neonatal care and reduce unnecessary antibiotic usage.”
“Prevention is one of the key pillars of longevity science,” Sergey Jakimov, LongeVC CEO told Longevity.Technology. “Melio has built a solid technological foundation for rapid pathogen detection in a clinical setting, preventing life-threatening conditions like sepsis. By choosing the neonatal market of antibiotic overprescription as its starting point, Melio can rapidly solve an acute need, demonstrate its value proposition, and successfully scale into an adult setting.”
Melio’s focus is the transformation of healthcare through the delivery of rapid and comprehensive diagnostics. LongeVC’s support will enable the company to accelerate platform development, expand clinical research to bring revolutionary healthcare solutions to more people and protect the vulnerable neonate population.
“The investment from LongeVC is a testament to our shared vision for the future of healthcare,” said Mridu Sinha, CEO of Melio. “We are committed to making culture-independent pathogen identification accessible to everyone and believe that this partnership will help us achieve our goal of improving health outcomes globally.”
[1] https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/42/4/489/5045017
