Why Attomarker chose a public funding route for work in Long Covid
When someone tells you Long Covid is “too short term” to invest in, as was told to us by an institutional investor, they are not making a scientific claim. They are revealing a mindset.
And that mindset explains more about the struggle for recognition, care, and progress in Long Covid than most policy documents ever will.
Long Covid is not small. It is not rare. It is not disappearing. Tens of millions of people are living with it globally.
But it is complex. It is heterogeneous. It does not behave like a single disease with a single mechanism and a single treatment pathway.
That complexity makes it harder to package.
And in funding terms, what is hard to package is often slow to finance.
It is for this reason that we have adopted the route of crowdfunding, in this case through the UK FCA-regulated platform, Crowdcube.
And in this case, a route born out of an investment chicken and egg mindset problem, also happens to be consistent with what our Long Covid community is quite used to – if something important needs addressing, we do so as a community.
The funding reality most patients never see
Investment models are built around pattern recognition.
Investors, and we are predominantly talking about the traditional investment industry, look for defined diseases, clear mechanisms, predictable regulatory routes, and scalable treatments. They look for categories that are already legible.
Long Covid is still becoming legible.
It spans immunology, neurology, cardiology, and infectious disease. It contains distinct immune endotypes rather than a single immune state. It presents with overlapping symptoms but different biological drivers.
That does not make it unimportant. It makes it analytically demanding.
And demanding fields do not always attract early, confident capital.
This is not about bad intent. It is about model fit. And Long Covid is yet to fit that model.
The paradox Long Covid is trapped in
Here is the structural trap.
Progress requires investment in diagnostics, profiling, trials, and specialist infrastructure.
But investment prefers areas that are already stable, well-characterised, and predictable.
Cancer provides a perfect ‘mature’ example. Highly defined populations. The endotypes established through various diagnostic techniques, including genomic testing. It has normalised what we are starting to discover in Long Covid. At Attomarker, we are genuinely excited about our role in providing that critical endotype step, and it is no longer a theory. However, for all our excitement, we are mindful that we, and Long Covid as a whole, sit early in disease maturity, and thus attractiveness to the traditional investment industry.
So Long Covid is asked to mature before it is funded.
And without funding, maturity takes far longer.
Patients experience that delay as abandonment.
Investors see caution as prudence.
Both are responding to the same misalignment.
And in that space between caution and urgency, organisations working seriously in Long Covid, like Attomarker, find themselves in an unusual position.
Where Attomarker stands
At Attomarker, we are not short of science. We are not short of clinical questions worth answering. We are not short of evidence that immune heterogeneity is real and that diagnostics can clarify it. We have a CE-marked platform technology, with 8 granted patents and more in progress. We have an endotype-defining Covid Antibody Spectrum Test already providing clinicians and patients with invaluable clinical insight.
But what we have encountered is the friction that arises when early but rigorous understanding does not yet fit established funding templates.
Traditional funding channels are optimised for clarity: a defined disease, a dominant mechanism, a treatment pathway that scales cleanly.
Long Covid is still in the phase where definition itself is part of the work, and the very work that Attomarker is engaged in – taking what the world so erroneously views as one disease – Long Covid – and separating it into its immunological endotypes, so that trial and treatment discussions are properly informed.
That does not make our work speculative.
It makes it structurally demanding.
And waiting quietly for conventional timelines to enable traditional funding did not feel proportionate to the scale and seriousness of the condition. After all, we’re more than 5 years in and patients themselves can’t wait.
Why we chose this route
So we made a deliberate choice.
We chose to use a regulated, transparent, public platform.
Not as a substitute for scientific discipline.
Not as an emotional appeal.
Not as a bypass around standards.
But as an acknowledgement of reality.
Long Covid has progressed because people refused to accept invisibility. Patients documented patterns when others hesitated. Clinicians persisted when evidence was incomplete. Researchers asked harder questions when easy ones failed.
It would be strange if funding architecture remained the one part of the system that never evolved.
Crowdcube provides a structured, FCA-regulated framework where information is public, scrutiny is visible, and governance is clear. It allows those who understand the complexity of Long Covid to evaluate the work directly and on equal terms.
That matters.
Because if recognition, infrastructure, and care are to grow, they must be supported by funding models that are willing to engage with complexity rather than wait for it to simplify itself.
A broader point
Long Covid is not “too short term.”
It is a condition that exposes the limits of systems built for simplicity.
If we want progress in heterogeneous, immune-mediated disease, we must accept that investment sometimes needs to move earlier in the sequence, towards understanding and classification, not only towards final-stage treatments.
That requires seriousness.
It requires transparency.
And it requires confidence in the work itself.
We are proud of our science.
We are humbled by the clinical seriousness.
And we are comfortable, and indeed excited, standing behind that work in public.
Long Covid deserves recognition.
Recognition enables infrastructure.
Infrastructure enables care.
If achieving that requires broader engagement, still under proper regulatory oversight, then that is a route we are happy to take.
And as a result, yet again, it will be the Long Covid community itself that moves to overcome its own challenges, a community that has already demonstrated what sustained attention can achieve.