Most people remember the COVID-19, Swine Flu, and AIDS pandemics. Kinled, a family office founded in 1924, has a much longer perspective — one that stretches back to the last urban plague epidemic.
A life sciences investor deploying capital across Switzerland, the EU, the UK, and the US, Kinled has built a strong track record of public listings and successful exits to leading global healthcare players. Now, it is placing a focused bet on one of the most promising areas of modern healthcare: precision medicine.
“Precision medicine is often misunderstood as something niche or reserved for rare diseases or premium care settings, but its real impact is much broader,” says Patrick Aisher, chairman of the firm, which he says operates a “philosophy-driven framework” at the intersection of life sciences, deep tech, and data-driven healthcare.
“As measurement technologies improve, it enables more objective, earlier, and targeted decision-making for everyday conditions — not just exceptional cases.”
Currently, healthcare is generic, diagnoses often come too late, and treatments are trial-and-error. Precision medicine represents a shift towards care based on individual needs, genetics, and lifestyle. The idea is that understanding each patient’s biology and individual contexts will increase the likelihood of successful outcomes.
A subset of medtech, precision medicine it works by collecting data from genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics to identify biomarkers and run advanced diagnostics, which also factors in real-world data, imaging, and digital health. Many of these companies are powered by artificial intelligence, which means they can crunch vast amounts of data at pace for a more holistic understanding of a patient’s health that wasn’t previously possible.
Over time, these changes can make healthcare more effective and more scalable, Aisher adds.
Technology is unlocking personalised medicine
Advances in technology have come at a crucial point in time as the ageing population and increasing care burdens are felt by governments. Health providers and pharmaceutical companies are also under pressure to save time and reduce waste from ineffective treatments.
Investors are paying attention: medtech venture funding rebounded last year as quarterly deal value climbed toward levels not seen since the 2020-2021 tech boom, according to PitchBook data. Global medtech VC was on track to reach a three-year high as of December 2, and PE had also been more active in the sector, according to a PitchBook’s Medtech VC and PE Trends report.
One category which fuelled renewed interest in the sector is precision medicine, which has adopted AI quicker than other sub-categories in health, per a 2026 healthcare outlook report. It shows how medicine is shifting from one-size-fits-all to precision.
Personalising the battle against cancer
Kinled portfolio companies 2cureX and PreComb are focused on making cancer treatment more effective through the use of microtumours, or tumoroids, which are grown in the lab but mimic the features of the original tumour.
“They move oncology away from trial-and-error toward evidence-based treatment selection,” says Aisher.
“Today, a large proportion of cancer patients receive therapies with relatively low probabilities of success, often enduring significant toxicity without benefit. By testing how a patient’s own tumour responds — whether through functional assays or advanced modelling — clinicians can make more informed decisions upfront, sparing patients ineffective treatments and improving outcomes,” the investor adds.
Founded in 2006 by Ole Thastrup and Grith Hagel, 2cureX has developed what it says is the first CE-IVD marked drug sensitivity test using microtumors based on the patient’s own cells, named IndiTreat. Danish-Swedish company is targeting colorectal cancer patients first, with goals to expand to pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer.
CE-IVD marking refers to European Union safety, quality, and performance regulations for in vitro medical diagnosis.
IndiTreat runs dozens of different tests on the microtumours to understand which treatments and standard of care regimes work the best, assessing how tumours grow or shrink over seven days. It then ranks drugs based on their likely effectiveness for patients, helping guide doctors’ choice of treatment for that specific patient.
Traditional molecular markers help only about 3% of colorectal cancer patients; the remaining 90% are treated via trial-and-error, often resulting in side effects from ineffective regimens. In clinical studies, IndiTreat-guided therapy resulted in a 50% stable disease rate at eight weeks, compared to just 20% under standard care, according to the company’s pitch deck.
Testing treatments and doses
PreComb, founded in 2018, was set up to “industrialise” medical testing so that patients no longer have to go through trial-and-error with different medication. The Swiss-based company’s technology also grows tiny, 3D versions of a patient’s specific tumor in a lab and tests different cancer treatments and doses of each outside of the patient’s body.
It was founded by Jens Kelm to solve the fact that 95% of oncology clinical trials fail because current models misrepresent the actual human tumour microenvironment.
Real tumours are three-dimensional, not flat, so medicine acts differently even when trialed outside of the body, the company says. Its robot arm configures the right drugs and the right quantity of it that’s needed, which means doctors can prescribe the treatment plan with the highest change of clinical success for that individual patient when treatment gets underway.
The platform has achieved 100% accurate predictions in clinical cases involving patient treatments, per the company’s pitch deck. It also uses digital twin technology to help pharmaceutical companies discover new drugs.
Precision medicine for neurodegenerative conditions
Tivenix, another Kinled portfolio company, is applying the same philosophy to a completely different space: the diagnosis of neurodegenerative conditions. Founded in Switzerland in 2021, the company has developed a dementia test using just a finger-prick blood sample.
“As populations age, dementia has indeed risen in parallel, and its impact extends far beyond the patient alone,” says Giancarlo Faglia, CEO of the company.
“It places an immense emotional, physical, and financial burden on families and caregivers, often over many years. The current one‑size‑fits‑all approach to dementia diagnosis and treatment contributes to this spiral by delaying clarity and limiting meaningful intervention.”
Dementia is also often diagnosed late, spotted only after noticeable cognitive decline, and the process of doing so based on subjective assessments and expensive imaging or lumbar punctures.
Precision medicine offers the chance to catch the chances of dementia early, when the pathology builds before symptoms appear. This helps to distinguish Alzheimer’s from other causes of forms of dementia, which aids treatment and support.
Tivenix’s technology identifies specific patterns in blood that are unique to Alzheimer’s. That’s because when brain cells die, they leave traces in the bloodstream, which is known as cfDNA, or cell-free DNA, a type of biomarker. It then uses AI to analyse the 10ml blood sample, which is trained to spot specific patterns of Alzheimer’s with 98% accuracy, per the company.
“They aim to shift the focus from late-stage management to earlier understanding and intervention, which is critical in addressing both the human and systemic challenges associated with ageing, and Alzheimer’s in particular,” Aisher says.
It’s especially important for elderly patients, Faglia adds, as “their physiological resilience is limited” and they tend to have a low tolerance for ineffective or toxic treatments.
Becoming the norm
Medicine is a highly regulated industry meaning the path to widespread adoption can be long — and precision medicine is no different, given they face extended clinical validation and FDA approval processes. Medtech companies need to plan on a 10-year time horizon, if not longer, per a Pitchbook analyst note.
This is a millenia in venture capital terms, as funds operate in 10-year cycles themselves and need to show returns to their own investors, or LPs. Exits come later than in biopharma or healthtech, yet there is still plenty of opportunity for aligned investors, per the Outlook report.
Kinled is an evergreen vehicle, designed to hold investments over a longer time than the likes of venture capital. This is known as “patient capital”; it allows firms to be flexible with timelines, providing founders greater leeway in achieving clinical and regulatory milestones.
Cost has also historically been a barrier to precision medicine, but Faglia says this is quickly changing. “As these tools become more scalable and more standardised, precision medicine will not be an exception — it will become the default,” he adds.
This content is produced in collaboration with Kinled, a Hong Kong-based investment firm with life science research facilities in Austria and Switzerland.
