QT Sense, a deep-tech biotech startup building tools to study living cells, announced it has secured €4 million in funding to accelerate its Quantum Nuova platform, a technology that lets scientists observe cellular processes in real time and reveal biochemical activity linked to disease.
The funding includes a €3 million seed investment led by Cottonwood Technology Fund, with follow-on backing from existing investor QDNL Participations and an angel investor.
In addition, the company received €600,000 from the ONCO-Q programme to support cancer research and €400,000 through the Quantum Forward Challenge for collaborative deployments with research partners.
Most traditional lab methods rely on frozen tissue or cells that are no longer alive, giving scientists only static snapshots of biology.
By contrast, Quantum Nuova lets researchers measure cellular stress and biological changes as they happen in living cells. The platform uses ultra-sensitive fluorescent nanodiamond quantum sensors that detect signals such as oxidative stress, metabolic shifts, and free radical activity, biological processes that play a role in how diseases develop and how cells respond to treatments.
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These signals are central to understanding diseases like cancer, sepsis, and chronic inflammatory conditions, but have been difficult to watch directly until now.
With Quantum Nuova, scientists can see how individual cells react to drugs, adapt to stress, or split into different subgroups. That adds a layer of insight beyond what genetics, traditional imaging, or fixed-cell methods can provide.
The technology has already been used to study how FDA-approved drugs affect cells. With the new funding from ONCO-Q, the company plans to apply it specifically to colorectal cancer research, mapping stress and metabolic vulnerabilities in tumour models to support the development of future diagnostics and therapies.
QT Sense was spun out of the University Medical Center Groningen in 2024, building on academic research into quantum sensing and cellular biology.
The team aims to turn what is now a high-performance prototype into a ready-to-deploy discovery platform for laboratories and drug discovery programmes. Planned upgrades include improvements in hardware robustness, throughput, and analytical capabilities.
Early access units are expected to go to strategic partners as part of validation and real-world use cases.
What QT Sense is doing
QT Sense is developing a new kind of research tool that lets scientists watch what cells do while they are alive. That’s an important difference from most existing tools, which require cells to be killed or frozen first.
At the core of their approach are tiny particles called nanodiamonds with special defects inside them. When these nanodiamonds are placed near a living cell and exposed to a laser, they glow.
The way they glow changes slightly in response to tiny chemical signals inside the cell, for example, when the cell is under stress or reacting to a drug. QT Sense’s system measures these changes and turns them into data that researchers can interpret.
This means scientists can see how cells behave and respond in real time, instead of looking only at snapshots taken after a cell has been killed.
For disease research and drug development, that matters because many important processes how a cancer cell responds to a treatment or how immune cells react to infection, happen dynamically and can be missed by older methods.
By providing a live view of cell behaviour at the individual cell level, QT Sense’s Quantum Nuova platform could help researchers uncover new clues about how diseases work, which drugs are effective, and how treatments can be improved.
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Ana-Maria Stanciuc