Funding accelerates clinical rollout of glycan biomarkers for aging and inflammation, pushing them into mainstream preventive care.
GlycanAge, a London-based biotech pioneering glycan-based biomarkers for biological aging and chronic inflammation, has raised $8.7 million to accelerate clinical development and expand access to glycan testing in hospitals and preventive healthcare systems worldwide.
The funding round was led by Fifth Quarter Ventures, with participation from Guinness Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, South Central Ventures, Impetus Capital, Vesna Deep Tech VC and Lightfield Equity. Existing investors, including LaunchHub Ventures and Kadmos Capital, also joined the round on a pro rata basis.
The raise marks a strategic shift for GlycanAge, which has already established its flagship biomarker in the longevity and preventive medicine space. Its core technology, an “inflammaging” clock based on IgG glycosylation, is currently used in hundreds of preventive and longevity clinics to help practitioners personalize interventions and track how patients respond to lifestyle changes, supplements or therapies over time [1].
Now, the company is aiming to embed that science directly into clinical decision-making.
Glycan testing measures subtle changes in sugar molecules attached to immunoglobulin G (IgG), a key antibody in the immune system. These changes reflect chronic inflammation and biological aging more dynamically than traditional markers, offering clinicians a window into how a patient’s health is evolving in real time.
With the new capital, GlycanAge plans to further develop clinical tools focused on stress and resilience, cardiometabolic health, weight management and hormonal health. These applications will be packaged into indication-specific products designed for routine clinical use, rather than specialist longevity settings.
In parallel, the company is working to validate select diagnostic indications and develop its first lab-developed tests (LDTs), enabling glycan biomarkers to be deployed in hospitals and reference laboratories.
“Scientific breakthroughs rarely make an impact on healthcare simply by existing,” said Nikolina Lauc, co-founder and CEO of GlycanAge. “They only change care once they become visible, trusted and easy to use. That’s the gap we’re closing for glycans.”
GlycanAge has already begun testing this transition in real-world hospital environments. Its first hospital pilot partner is St Catherine Specialty Hospital in Zagreb, a regional leader in personalized medicine and the first hospital in Europe to introduce whole-genome sequencing into routine patient care.
St Catherine has now become the first hospital globally to integrate glycan-based biomarkers into routine cardiometabolic risk screening, using GlycanAge’s proprietary platform.
“Together with genetics, the concept of personalized medicine requires a dynamic approach,” said Dragan Primorac, MD, founder of St Catherine Specialty Hospital.
“Genomics provides the blueprint of where we begin, but health is not static – it evolves with time, environment, and lifestyle. To truly transform care, we must complement genomic insights with modifiable biomarkers: biological signals that capture real-time responses to interventions and track improvement longitudinally,” Primorac added.
Building on this early adoption, GlycanAge plans to deploy its technology in more than 10 hospitals across Europe and the Middle East over the next year.
As part of that expansion, the company has partnered with King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), which will host GlycanAge’s first Saudi laboratory. The facility will serve as a central hub for glycan testing and method transfer across hospital and laboratory networks in the Kingdom.
For the company’s scientific leadership, the long-term goal is to normalize glycan testing as part of standard preventive care.
“Our goal is to make glycan testing part of standard preventive diagnostics, where everyone over the age of 30 can access it through their healthcare provider,” said Professor Gordan Lauc, co-founder and chief scientific officer of GlycanAge.
Investors backing the round see GlycanAge’s approach as a critical bridge between cutting-edge biology and scalable healthcare delivery.
“We’re proud to back GlycanAge as they redefine how health is measured and managed,” said Malcolm King, CIO at Guinness Ventures. “We believe their work in glycomics has the potential to advance preventative healthcare and longevity science.”
Similarly, BrightCap Ventures pointed to the company’s progression from analytics to diagnostics as a key inflection point.
“Backed by rigorous scientific validation, GlycanAge has pioneered the first IgG glycan ‘inflammaging’ bioclock,” said Elina Halatcheva, managing partner at BrightCap Ventures. “We see tremendous potential as GlycanAge advances from preventive analytics toward clinically actionable diagnostics.”
As healthcare systems increasingly seek tools to detect risk earlier and track improvement over time, GlycanAge is positioning glycan biomarkers as a missing piece in preventive medicine, one that translates complex biology into actionable, everyday clinical insights.
