Amazec Photonics,  the Dutch photonics startup, has secured a €1.5 million Seed Round to develop its minimally invasive medical diagnosis devices.

The round was led by PhotonDelta – a cross-border growth accelerator and ecosystem of photonic chip technology organisations – with a number of private investors also contributing. The funding will be used to develop devices for clinical trials.

Cardiovascular diseases are the world’s leading cause of death accounting for 19 million deaths a year. This is in part due to the difficulty in diagnosing conditions which leads to delays in treatment. Amazec’s solution is a step forward in this battle, as it can enable much earlier and much more accurate diagnosis for minimal costs and complexity.

Amazec Photonics creates easy to apply cardiovascular monitoring tools. Existing solutions are complex, invasive and often inaccurate.

IMG_0257-150x150.jpegThe most common technique to measure cardiac output  is called thermodilution which involves injecting a known volume of liquid upstream of the heart and then measuring temperature changes downstream through specialised catheters inserted into the patient.

This has several drawbacks including an inability to be used reliably during routine examination, large variation between measurements, a lack of sensitivity and high costs. Consequently, it often leads to late or misdiagnosis – severely impacting the outlook for patients.

In contrast, Amazec’s solution uses photonics-based technology to measure temperature changes to an unprecedented precision of 0.0001˚C (compared to current accuracy of 0.01˚C). The monitoring device is external which means there is no need to insert catheters. Multiple measurements can be made in real time which improves reliability – this is in contrast to the single measurement used in current methods.

“The number of people suffering from cardiovascular diseases has risen by 93% over the past 25 years and now impacts an estimated 550 million patients worldwide,” says Amazec CEO Pim Kat (pictured), “many of these people will die or suffer poor health outcomes because the tools we have to diagnose them simply aren’t good enough. Our solution can make a real difference because, not only does it vastly improve the accuracy of testing for cardiovascular disease, it is also much less invasive and simpler to use. This will substantially reduce costs and open the door to many more people being tested much more regularly. With this funding round we will be able to build ten prototypes and undertake extensive clinical trials with the intention of producing and selling devices across the EU by 2028.”

PhotonDelta’s investment in Amazec Photonics is the latest step in the organisation’s goal to create a world leading photonics industry in the Netherlands. PhotonDelta aims to help build 200 startups, create new applications for photonic chips and develop infrastructure and talent.

Amazec will begin clinical trials of its device at Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven this year, with an expansion to three other hospitals planned in 2025 with the aim of beginning full scale production and sale across the EU in 2028.