Cyclana has set up its lab at the Babraham Accelerator and plans to grow its team over three years to build robust tissue models, clarify disease mechanisms and patient stratification, and identify drug candidates for clinical development.

Cyclana Bio, a Cambridge-based biotech, has raised $6.6 million in pre-seed funding to develop tissue-level models and therapies for chronic inflammatory diseases, starting with endometriosis.

The founders contend that current drug development relies on 2D cell culture and limited tissue context, leading to high late-stage failure, and their approach aims to improve translational accuracy.

The team emphasizes a tissue-centric platform inspired by aging biology and a multidisciplinary environment, with potential to transform therapeutic discovery beyond women’s health.

A key innovation is using menstrual fluid as a rich source of biopsy-grade tissue to build physiologically relevant endometrial models and to capture real patient-derived data.

The company combines multi-scale data—epigenetics, cell signaling, and extracellular matrix biology—to create in vitro endometrial models that more closely mimic human physiology for target discovery and patient-response prediction.

Founded earlier this year by Dr. Léa Wenger and Prof. Kevin Chalut, former Altos Labs researchers, Cyclana aims to test treatments in organ- and tissue-relevant models rather than conventional cell cultures.

Endometriosis, affecting about one in ten women globally, is the initial focus, with potential to broaden to other chronic inflammation and fibrosis-related diseases.