PlaqueTec's Artery Biopsy Tech Aims to Decode Heart Disease

CAMBRIDGE, England – April 27, 2026 – Medtech innovator PlaqueTec has secured $5 million in an oversubscribed financing round to advance a technology that listens to the whispers of disease directly from inside the heart's own arteries. The funding, provided entirely by existing investors, signals strong confidence in the company's pioneering approach to understanding the inflammatory drivers of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

The investment will fuel the expansion of BioCarta, PlaqueTec’s proprietary data lake. This isn't just another collection of patient records; it's a high-resolution map built from biological data sampled directly at the site of coronary plaques, the dangerous buildups that can lead to heart attacks. By moving beyond conventional blood tests, the company aims to create a new paradigm for diagnosing, stratifying, and ultimately treating the world's leading cause of death.

A New Frontier in Cardiovascular Diagnostics

For decades, the tools to assess cardiovascular risk have relied on systemic information. Standard blood tests measure cholesterol and inflammatory markers circulating throughout the body, while imaging techniques like angiograms show the physical structure of blockages. While valuable, these methods provide an incomplete picture, often failing to identify which specific plaques are inflamed, unstable, and most likely to rupture.

PlaqueTec is tackling this challenge with its Liquid Biopsy System™ (LBS™), a specialized catheter-based device. The technology represents a fundamental shift from systemic to site-of-disease analysis. During a standard cardiac procedure, such as an angioplasty, the LBS™ is guided into the coronary artery. There, it collects minute blood samples from the “boundary layer”—the area immediately surrounding a plaque where proteins and other biomarkers shed by the lesion are most concentrated.

This method allows for the measurement of a “trans-plaque gradient,” comparing biomarker concentrations in blood sampled just upstream and downstream of a plaque. The subtle differences reveal the unique biochemical signature of that specific lesion, offering unprecedented insight into its inflammatory activity. Because the procedure is performed as an adjunct to a medically necessary intervention, it provides this critical data without subjecting patients to a separate invasive procedure.

This approach stands in stark contrast to large-scale data initiatives like the UK Biobank or the National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR), which rely on systemic blood samples, health records, and imaging. While these databases are powerful for population-level analysis, PlaqueTec's technology drills down to the molecular level of an individual's specific disease, generating a type of data that has been previously inaccessible.

BioCarta: The Data Lake Fueling Precision Medicine

The $5 million in new capital is dedicated to building out the BioCarta data lake, the bioinformatics platform at the core of PlaqueTec’s strategy. BioCarta integrates the thousands of proteomic data points captured by the LBS™ with each patient’s comprehensive clinical information, including plaque imaging, genomic analysis, and traditional blood biochemistry.

The ultimate goal is to move beyond the one-size-fits-all diagnosis of coronary artery disease. By analyzing this rich, multi-layered data, PlaqueTec is identifying distinct patient subgroups, or “endotypes,” each with a unique molecular signature of their disease. This level of detail could revolutionize how patients are treated, allowing for therapies targeted at the specific inflammatory pathways driving their condition.

"The decision by our existing shareholders to reinvest, and to do so at a level that exceeded our target, speaks directly to their confidence in what PlaqueTec's data is revealing about cardiovascular disease," said Martin Stapleton, Chairman of PlaqueTec, in a statement. "We are building something genuinely differentiated: a high-resolution, intracoronary data asset that is poised to underpin the next generation of cardiovascular therapeutics. This round validates that strategy and gives us the runway to prove it.”

From Clinical Trial to Commercial Strategy

The scientific foundation for BioCarta is the ongoing BIOPATTERN trial, a study recruiting 300 patients with coronary artery disease across eight specialist cardiac centers within the UK's National Health Service (NHS). The trial, managed in collaboration with the prestigious Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, is systematically collecting the intracoronary samples that populate and enrich the data lake.

Positive interim results from the trial have already validated the core principles of the technology. An analysis of the first cohort of patients, presented last year at the European Atherosclerosis Society Congress, confirmed the safety and functionality of the LBS™. More importantly, it demonstrated the system's ability to detect distinct protein gradients across coronary plaques, proving that localized biological signals can indeed be captured.

PlaqueTec's business model, however, is not to become a routine diagnostic provider. Instead, the company is positioning BioCarta as an invaluable platform asset for the pharmaceutical industry. By identifying novel inflammatory targets and defining patient endotypes, the company offers a powerful tool to de-risk and accelerate drug development. Pharmaceutical partners can leverage these insights to select more promising drug candidates and design smaller, more targeted, and more successful clinical trials.

The company is already in active discussions with potential pharmaceutical and biotech partners who see the value in this unique approach. For an industry grappling with high failure rates in cardiovascular drug development, a tool that can precisely identify which patients will benefit from a new therapy is a game-changer.

Redefining the Future of Heart Disease Treatment

The ultimate promise of PlaqueTec's work extends directly to patients. By creating a detailed understanding of plaque biology, this technology could one day enable doctors to identify vulnerable plaques before they cause a heart attack, offering a window for preventative intervention. Furthermore, the ability to stratify patients into precise endotypes opens the door to true precision medicine for cardiovascular disease.

Instead of treating all patients with a standard regimen of statins and blood thinners, future treatments could be tailored to the specific inflammatory processes occurring inside a patient’s arteries. A patient with one type of inflammatory signature might receive a drug that targets a specific protein, while another patient with a different signature receives an alternative therapy. This targeted approach promises not only greater efficacy but also fewer side effects.

By generating a new class of biological data, PlaqueTec is laying the groundwork for a future where cardiovascular care is more predictive, personalized, and effective, potentially transforming outcomes for millions of patients worldwide.