iPremom, an EIC Accelerator Winner, Screens Early for Preeclampsia

Preeclampsia, according to the EU project record, is often detected only after the mother's organs have already been damaged. iPremom, a company in Paterna near Valencia, offers a blood test taken between weeks 9 and 14 that reads fragments of cell-free RNA in the mother's plasma and uses a statistical model to give a risk score for early-onset preeclampsia. The CORDIS project record says the MaiRa test aims to predict the condition up to 18 weeks before symptoms, so that preventive treatment such as low-dose aspirin can start in time.

The EIC Accelerator selected the MaiRa project at its 1 October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,999 under a grant agreement signed on 28 May 2026, for a project running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. In September 2026 the company announced a €15 million seed round. What the record does not yet hold is the prospective validation that the company itself is running to confirm its published accuracy figures.

What the test measures

Cell-free RNA is genetic material released into the blood by tissues, including the placenta and the lining of the uterus. The company's model, as described in CORDIS, uses a 36-gene signature and in-house software to turn a first-trimester sample into an individual risk score. The scientific basis is a paper by Nerea Castillo-Marco, Tamara Garrido-Gómez, Carlos Simón and colleagues, published in Nature Communications on 20 October 2025. Its authors write that the early-onset signals were enriched for transcripts from the decidua, the uterine lining, while the late-onset models drew on a wider mix of tissues.

Screening already exists. The ASPRE screening study combined maternal history, blood pressure, uterine artery Doppler and serum markers at 11 to 13 weeks to pick high-risk women, and the ASPRE trial that followed found preterm preeclampsia in 1.6% of high-risk women given 150 mg of aspirin against 4.3% on placebo (NEJM, 2017). CORDIS describes MaiRa as a decision-support tool alongside that screening, not a replacement. In the United States, Mirvie launched a cell-free RNA test called Encompass in May 2025, sampled at 18 to 22 weeks; iPremom's sample is taken earlier, at 9 to 14 weeks.

The evidence, and how much of it there is

The PREMOM study recruited 9,586 pregnant women at 14 Spanish hospitals between September 2021 and June 2024, according to the ESHRE press release of 29 June 2025. The cell-free RNA analysis did not use all of them. It was a nested case-control study of 216 women: 42 who developed early-onset preeclampsia, 43 with late-onset disease and 131 with uncomplicated pregnancies. The first-trimester early-onset model, built on 36 transcripts, reached 83% sensitivity, 90% specificity and an area under the curve of 0.88, per the paper. The authors also checked their models against an external public dataset of 190 samples.

Two points matter for anyone reading the 83%. It comes from 42 cases selected from the cohort, not from screening every woman in it, which is what iPregnostic is set up to do. The paper's competing interests section states that nine authors are iPremom employees, that Carlos Simón is a founder of the company, and that four authors are inventors on patent application EP24383276.3 for methods of determining preeclampsia risk.

The sources also disagree on the lead time. CORDIS and the paper say "up to 18 weeks" before onset; the ESHRE release gives 18 weeks as an average and its lead paragraph says five months.

On sale in Spain before the validation reports

The company's website offers MaiRa from week 9 with a gynaecologist's prescription. The seed round announcements by Amadeus Capital and the Spanish biotech association Asebio both say the test is available in Spain through iPremom's own laboratory, and that the new money is for completing validation studies, a commercial launch and regulatory approvals in the EU and the US. None of the pages reviewed on 4 November 2026 names a CE marking under the EU In Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices Regulation, a price, or a number of tests sold. In June 2025 Garrido said in the ESHRE release that cell-free RNA screening could reach clinical practice "within the next year", pending validation and regulatory work.

1. First-trimester prediction modelPublishedNature Communications, October 2025: AUC 0.88 at 9 to 14 weeks, on a case-control set.
2. Prospective clinical validationRecruitingiPregnostic, target 7,473 women, primary completion estimated February 2027.
3. Regulatory approval in the EU and USNot shownListed as a use of the seed funds; no certificate found on 4 November 2026.
4. Commercialisation across the EUSpain onlyOffered through the company's own laboratory in Spain, per the seed announcements.

The money and the register

CORDIS lists one project for the company, MaiRa, with the €2,499,999 EU contribution and no total cost filled in. Blended finance combines a grant with an equity component, but the EIC Fund beneficiaries page does not name iPremom and none of the seed round announcements mentions an EIC investment, so whether and how much the EIC Fund has invested is not public. The Carlos Simon Foundation says its two spin-offs, Premium Fertility (selected in 2024) and iPremom, account together for close to €5 million in European funding. The company's website also credits FEDER funds through the Valencian agency IVACE, and AVI.

The Valencia commercial register, published in the BORME, records three capital increases in fifteen months. Subscribed share capital, a nominal figure rather than the sums investors paid, rose to €3,822,235 in an entry published on 29 April 2025, to €4,191,073 on 15 January 2026 and to €4,781,543 on 7 July 2026, when the existing classes of shares were merged into one and a new Class D of 590,470 shares was created. An entry published on 4 June 2026 shows the two joint administrators, Carlos Simón Vallés and David Jiménez Moreno, replaced by a board with Pierre Socha of Amadeus Capital and the CEO Guillermo Ferrando Huertas. The infoempresa register summary shows the company as active, puts its headcount in the 1 to 9 band and its turnover under €2 million; the filed accounts behind those bands were not read for this article.

Why it matters for Europe

The company's website puts preeclampsia at one in twenty pregnancies and the seed announcements at 5 to 8% worldwide. The ASPRE result is why timing matters: aspirin in that trial started at 11 to 14 weeks. A test sold across the EU falls under the IVD Regulation, and EU approval is a goal the company names in its seed announcement, not one it has reported reaching. Mirvie's test shows that the cell-free RNA approach is already being sold commercially in the United States.

iPremom has not been asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.