MedicQuant, an EIC Accelerator Winner, Tests Stroke Blood Thinners

When a stroke patient arrives on a direct oral anticoagulant, the doctors face a question they often cannot answer in time: how much of the drug is still in the blood. The answer decides whether clot-dissolving thrombolysis can be given, and the CORDIS summary of MedicQuant's EIC project says conventional laboratory tests take more than 40 minutes. MedicQuant ApS, an Aarhus University spin-out, says its cartridge and benchtop reader give a drug concentration from whole blood in under ten minutes, without sample preparation.

The European Innovation Council put the company on its list of 38 companies selected for EIC Accelerator funding, published on 15 June 2026, as the only Danish name and with blended finance recommended. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 28 September 2026 for €2,494,930, running from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The project is a month old, so this article sets out what was promised and what can already be checked.

Why a drug level matters in a stroke

Direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) such as apixaban, rivaroxaban and dabigatran prevent clots, and for a patient having an ischaemic stroke they create a dilemma. The project summary states that thrombolysis cannot be given if DOAC concentrations are too high, because of the risk of fatal bleeding in the brain, and that every 15 minutes of delay raises mortality by 4% and severe disability by 7%. Those are the company's figures in its application.

The clinical ground is also moving. A cohort study of 832 stroke patients who had taken a DOAC within 48 hours and still received thrombolysis, published in JAMA Neurology in 2023, found a lower rate of symptomatic brain haemorrhage than in controls and, in the authors' words as summarised by GPnotebook, insufficient evidence of excess harm in selected patients. If stroke guidelines relax on DOACs, a fast drug level becomes a tool for selecting patients rather than a precondition for treating them. MedicQuant's own target, in CORDIS, is to have its test written into EU and US stroke guidelines by 2030.

How the test works

The platform comes out of the laboratory of Kurt Gothelf at iNANO, Aarhus University, and the company says it rests on more than eleven years of DNA nanotechnology research. According to MedicQuant's website, a drop of blood runs through a separation filter onto a glass-fibre strip carrying two dried reagents; the reader then excites one of two fluorescent dyes and compares the light emitted by both to estimate the drug concentration. The company calls the format a flow-front immunoassay and says the method is patent-pending.

That separates it from the two established routes. Laboratory anti-Xa assays and mass spectrometry, the reference methods in the studies cited here, run on plasma in a central laboratory. A urine DOAC dipstick is quicker but answers a narrower question: in a single-centre study of 101 stroke patients in Giessen, published in December 2025, it detected anticoagulant activity above 30 ng/mL with 100% sensitivity, in a median of 19 minutes against 144 minutes for blood anti-Xa testing. MedicQuant's pitch is a number, not a yes or no, from blood drawn at the bedside.

What has been published

Two pieces of evidence are public. An abstract for the European Stroke Organisation Conference 2026, printed in the European Stroke Journal in May 2026 with outside researchers and three MedicQuant staff among the authors, compared the platform with calibrated anti-Xa testing against mass spectrometry in patients on apixaban. It concluded that quantification up to 200 ng/mL is feasible and comparable, and stated that "validation studies in emergency settings are required." The samples were centrifuged plasma, not the whole blood the product is designed for, and the page does not give the number of patients.

The company's website lists a paper in ACS Sensors, published on 2 July 2026, describing the system for small-molecule drugs in blood. The full text could not be retrieved for this article. Beyond that, the CORDIS summary says usability studies were run at Bispebjerg Hospital in Copenhagen and University College London, that large-scale testing took place at University Hospital Tübingen, and that an instrument is already in use at Bispebjerg. No independent report of the Bispebjerg installation was found.

The money behind it

MedicQuant has been financed in small steps. Aarhus University reported in May 2023 that the company had raised more than DKK 12 million, most of it from the Danish Growth Fund. The same year, CORDIS records a €75,000 Women TechEU action from July 2023 to June 2024 to build a market access strategy and prepare for venture fundraising. Nordic9 reported on 21 February 2026 a DKK 22 million seed round led by Delphinus Venture Capital with EIFO, and TechSavvy repeated the figure when it covered the EIC award. The register lists Delphinus Venture Capital K/S and EIFO among the legal owners.

The filed accounts, as shown by eStatistik and FirmaAPI, show equity rising from minus DKK 122,000 at the end of 2022 to DKK 11.2 million at the end of 2023, then drifting down to DKK 10.0 million at the end of 2025 on annual losses between DKK 0.5 and 0.9 million. No revenue figure is published in the register data. The 2026 seed round and the EIC grant fall after the last filed year.

TechSavvy reported that the blended-finance award includes the option of up to €4 million of equity from the EIC Fund at a later date. No EIC Fund investment in MedicQuant has been announced, and CORDIS records only the grant.

What the EIC is paying for

The project's stated aim is to develop and clinically validate the apixaban test. By 2030, the company tells CORDIS, it wants its test in EU and US stroke guidelines, €37 million of revenue and a 41-person team, before moving to other DOAC emergencies and to antibiotics, anticancer drugs and immunosuppressants. Every one of those is a target, not a result.

1. Working whole-blood prototypeShownCartridge and reader described on the company site; the published abstract used centrifuged plasma.
2. Accuracy against laboratory methodsEarly dataComparable to calibrated anti-Xa up to 200 ng/mL in the ESOC 2026 abstract, co-written by company staff.
3. Clinical validation in stroke careNot yetThe aim of the grant, which started on 1 October 2026.
4. CE marking under the IVD RegulationNot announcedNo certificate or clearance appears on the company website.

Where it fits in EU policy

An in vitro diagnostic of this kind has to be certified under the EU's IVD Regulation before it can be sold, and the company lists a director of quality assurance and regulatory affairs on its team page. CORDIS places the project under the EIC Accelerator's open topic rather than a strategic challenge. The project's case is clinical rather than industrial: faster treatment decisions in stroke, where the project's own figures put the cost of each 15-minute delay in lives and disability.

As of November 2026 the company is active: the register shows it as normal with 11 employees, the website reports appearances at the German stroke congress and a regulatory event in September 2026, and it says it is raising a second equity round.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.