Emerging from stealth, Helsinki-Cambridge biotech startup Switchpoint Bio has raised $5.3 million in a pre-seed financing round, including a $5 million investment from Treehouse Delmar Investments.
Modern medicines increasingly target precise biological mechanisms, yet once treatment begins, it can be difficult to see how an individual patient’s underlying biology is actually changing and why one patient responds while another does not.
Clinical endpoints can take months or years to read out, tissue biopsies are invasive and difficult to repeat, and conventional blood biomarkers often track outcomes without explaining the biology behind them.
The company is advancing a new way to measure those changes from blood. Circulating immune cells carry epigenomic marks of disease, exposures and treatment.
Switchpoint Bio combines precision epigenomic profiling and AI to read that record, aiming to give drug developers a scalable view of how disease and treatment change human biology.
For drug developers, treatment response provides an immediate application: What biology is present before treatment? What changes after a drug is given, by how much, and in what way? What persists despite treatment?
Making those changes measurable over time could provide an earlier and more direct view of mechanism, response and resistance, helping drug developers understand which patients benefit, which do not, and why.
“Drug developers need to know not only whether a patient responds, but what biology changed, what persisted and why,” said Samuel Myllykangas, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Switchpoint Bio.
“Our goal is to make these biological switchpoints visible from a routine blood sample, repeatedly and at the scale required for drug development.”
From deep cellular biology to a scalable blood measurement
Recent advances in epigenomics, single-cell biology, population-scale datasets and AI are making it possible to connect scalable blood measurements to the underlying cellular biology of disease. Single-cell multiomic technologies (which analyse multiple types of biological data, such as DNA, RNA and proteins, within individual cells) can provide detailed insights into how cells function.
However, they typically require fresh samples, complex processing and specialised laboratory procedures, making them difficult to use repeatedly across large numbers of patients and at multiple stages of clinical development.
Switchpoint Bio is developing a scalable approach based on targeted DNA methylation profiling directly from blood. Its assay focuses on epigenomically active regions relevant to disease and immune biology, giving deep, cost-efficient coverage of the parts of the methylome that matter most for drug development.
Built at the intersection of genomics, epigenomics and drug development
The company was founded by Samuel Myllykangas, PhD, and Jason Buenrostro, PhD, collaborators since developing targeted sequencing technologies together at Stanford University. Buenrostro, a MacArthur Fellow, is a professor at Harvard University, Director of the Epigenomics Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and inventor of ATAC-seq, a foundational epigenomic profiling technology.
Myllykangas previously built and scaled Blueprint Genetics, which was acquired by Quest Diagnostics in 2020.
They were joined by three co-founders: Niilo Färkkilä, PhD, Chief Commercial Officer, who brings pharmaceutical industry experience from Amgen and GSK; Jussi Paananen, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, who previously served as CTO at Blueprint Genetics; and Mitja Kurki, PhD, Scientific Advisor, who brings experience in population genomics and pharmaceutical data platforms from FinnGen, a nationwide biobank study spanning more than 500,000 participants. Paananen and Kurki have both previously worked as scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
The company is now moving from platform development into clinical and industry validation. Switchpoint Bio is testing its approach in autoimmune disease, including systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), to determine whether it can epigenomically identify disease-relevant immune states from blood and follow them longitudinally through treatment.
In parallel, Switchpoint Bio is in active discussions with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to define its first industry validation programs, with treatment response emerging as a key area of interest.
“We take a long-term view, backing science we believe can genuinely change how disease is understood and treated,” said Dave Proctor of Treehouse Delmar Investments.
“Switchpoint Bio brings together exceptional scientific talent with a real path to turning breakthrough biology into evidence that helps patients, and we’re proud to support that work.”
The financing will support continued clinical and industry validation, expansion of the company’s clinical and biobank datasets, further development of its epigenomic and AI platform, and growth of its scientific and technical team across Helsinki and Cambridge.
Lead image: Switchpoint Bio's founding team. From left: Jussi Paananen, PhD (Chief Technology Officer); Niilo Färkkilä, PhD (Chief Commercial Officer); Samuel Myllykangas, PhD (Chief Executive Officer); Mitja Kurki, PhD (Scientific Advisor); Jason Buenrostro, PhD (Scientific Advisor).
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