Cyclana Bio lands funding to advance therapeutics for chronic inflammation diseases, starting with endometriosis.
British biotech Cyclana Bio has raised $6.6 million in pre-seed funding to develop next-generation therapies for diseases characterized by chronic inflammation, using cutting-edge tissue modeling technologies that capture how disease behaves in the human body. The Cambridge-based company is initially focused on women’s health, specifically endometriosis, a painful chronic inflammatory condition where womb lining tissue grows outside the uterus.
Founded earlier this year by Dr Léa Wenger and Prof. Kevin Chalut, both former scientists at longevity biotech giant Altos Labs, Cyclana aims to close long-standing gaps in women’s health by studying endometriosis at the tissue level rather than in individual cells. Drawing on its founders’ learnings in aging biology, the company integrates multi-scale biological data spanning epigenetics, cell signaling and extracellular matrix biology to create in vitro models that replicate human endometrial tissue.
In theory, the approach enables Cyclana to test therapies in conditions that closely mimic the natural environment of the disease, potentially overcoming one of the major reasons most drugs fail in clinical trials.
Longevity.Technology: Alongside companies like Ochre Bio and Bexorg, Cyclana is part of a growing movement in biotech towards tissue- and organ-based approaches to drug discovery. Something has to change – with around 90% drug candidates failing in clinical trials, maintaining the status quo simply isn’t an option. Cyclana’s initial goal is to build a physiologically relevant model of endometriosis in the lab so it can identify new drug targets and predict patient responses more accurately. We sat down with its co-founders to learn more.
Cyclana’s Altos connection is no coincidence – the core principles and mechanisms that the company is founded on have broad implications, not only in women’s health, but also in many age-related diseases.
“A lot of the realizations that shaped Cyclana came from our collaborative work at Altos,” says Wenger. “Kevin and I met there. Altos is a great discovery environment, very collaborative, and that’s where we began to see the power of integrating multi-scale data: looking at the epigenetics of a process, the matrix structure of the tissue, and the functional behavior of the cells all together.”
Combining epigenetic and matrix data
Having ‘clicked’ early on in their time at Altos, both founders found they shared a keen interest in women’s health, with Wenger having a particularly personal motivation.
“I have endometriosis — so I’m very aware of both the medical and scientific limitations,” she says. “Like any scientist with a condition, you end up researching it deeply. We realized that endometriosis was a perfect case for the approaches we’d been developing – integrating epigenetic and matrix data – and that it was a mission we wanted to pursue together.”
According to Wenger, endometriosis research has suffered from a combination of underfunding – women’s health has historically lacked grants and resources – but also because it is a challenging disease to study.
“You have cells that are in the wrong place, and while they’re not cancerous, they proliferate and behave in similar ways,” she explains. “Targeting them is difficult, because you’re dealing with the endometrium itself. It’s not a case where a single cell type goes wrong and you can isolate the mechanism. It’s a whole-tissue problem.”
For Chalut, endometriosis, estimated to affect one in 10 women worldwide, is one of many diseases that must first be understood at the tissue level in order to effectively treat them.
“Throughout my career, I’ve been trying to ‘zoom out’ – to study disease not just at the molecular or cellular level, but at the tissue scale, where cells interact with each other and with the extracellular matrix,” he says. “That’s where disease actually emerges.”
Wenger was inspired by Kevin’s work exploring the extracellular matrix, which demonstrated that cells behave completely differently depending on their environment.
“You can plate identical cells on matrices of different stiffness or composition, and they’ll express entirely different surface receptors and signaling pathways,” she says. “That means when we culture cells on 2D plastic – which is how most drug screening is still done – we’re forcing them into an unnatural environment. The drugs might appear to work or fail, but that response often doesn’t reflect what happens in the human body. So our aim is to test drugs in conditions that truly mimic how cells behave in vivo.”
Does menstrual fluid hold the key?
As a tissue-level disease, endometriosis presents a particularly exciting opportunity, due to a unique source of access to human data: menstrual fluid.
“Menstrual fluid contains biopsy-grade tissue that’s naturally shed every month – there’s nothing else like it in medicine,” says Chalut. “That gives us a unique window into the disease. We can build tissue models that mirror both disease and health in vitro, find new drug targets, and contribute to a broader shift in how people think about therapeutic discovery – moving beyond cells in a dish to real tissue systems.”
The company is also pioneering the use of menstrual fluid as a biological resource, collecting samples from volunteers to build physiologically relevant models of the endometrium.
“Menstrual fluid gives us an unprecedented opportunity to learn – far beyond what we can discover from blood or other samples,” says Wenger. “It’s a way for women to play an active role in advancing the science behind diseases that have affected them and been ignored for too long. By donating, they’re helping us build the foundation for better understanding and treatment – not just for endometriosis, but for women’s health more broadly.”
Wider applications in chronic inflammation
The founders have been busy – in less than six months, Cyclana raised its pre-seed funding while simultaneously setting up its lab at the Babraham Accelerator and is already generating data.
“We have two excellent scientists on board and plan to expand the team further,” says Wenger. “Over the next three years, we aim to build a physiologically relevant tissue model, generate insights into disease mechanisms and patient stratification, and identify strong drug candidates to take forward to clinical development.”
While Cyclana’s immediate focus is on endometriosis, the founders believe their platform could have broader applications across chronic inflammatory and fibrosis-related diseases, where tissue-level dysfunction and extracellular matrix changes play a central role.
“Chronic inflammation underlies many conditions, and our approach will likely translate to others,” says Wenger. “But with a small team, we need to stay focused to deliver real impact. If we succeed, the applications beyond endometriosis will be obvious – and we’ll be ready to explore them.”
