07/01/2021 - Press

Start-up Actome GmbH closes seed financing round

Investment contract signed with b.value AG and further investors to start operative business

The company Actome was founded in 2017 to further develop the "Emulsion Coupling" technology patented by inventor Dr. Csaba Jeney to product maturity. With the technology, a large number of different proteins as well as their interactions can be detected simultaneously. The young company was incubated at Hahn-Schickard as well as at the Department of Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg and managed to provide functional proof of concept for the technology in this environment, which suggests an enormous application potential in the field of life sciences. The seed investment will now be used to build the operational business and bring the first commercial products to market. Peter Kallien, the CEO of "b.value Deutsche Biotechnologie Beteiligungs AG" from Düsseldorf, is convinced that Actome's innovative technology represents a real breakthrough that will revolutionize research and biomedicine.

“Our technology expands the capabilities of digital PCR from nucleic acids to proteins. The application of our technology in the fields of proteomics, molecular pathway research and biomarker discovery will help to increase our knowledge about molecular biological processes and will transform medical diagnostics in an unprecedented way”, says Dr. Csaba Jeney, co-founder, CEO and inventor of the technology.

In addition to the investment, b.value AG will actively support Actome's business development in the future to accelerate the company's growth. The first products will enable life science researchers to quantify proteins and protein interactions in biological samples with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity.

In the process, known as "emulsion coupling," the sample to be analyzed is divided into millions of microdroplets, i.e. converted into an emulsion. These microdroplets are then analyzed for the co-localization of DNA barcodes with which the proteins were previously labeled. Therefore, established laboratory DNA analysis equipment can be used for this type of protein analysis. This generic detection method has the potential to significantly outperform previously established analytical methods in terms of both parallelism and detection limit. This approach can also be used to develop innovative diagnostic procedures on the basis of which patients can be treated more individually and better with personalized therapies.

Actome GmbH

Actome provides assay kits, bioinformatics software and services for the sensitive, highly parallel and quantitative measurement of proteins and protein interactions. Actome's long-term vision is to decipher the entire interactome and use these insights in molecular diagnostic products for personalized medicine. Actome's initial products will target the research market, with a specific focus on assay kits for multi-omics and single cell analysis.