Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is considered the most common cardiac disease in cats, affecting up to approximately 15% of the domestic cat population. Some cat breeds, such as Maine Coons and Ragdolls, are predisposed to developing HCM.

At yet heartbreakingly, the disease can often remain undetected until it causes heart failure or sudden death.

UK biotech MI:RNA Diagnostics is trying to change this.

Founded by cardiologist Dr. Eve Hanks, the company is developing what could become the first blood-based diagnostic platform designed specifically to detect feline HCM using microRNA biomarkers.

MI:RNA Diagnostics is currently moving its product into external validation before launching in Europe in 2027, Dr. Hanks told Feline Business Brief on the sidelines of the Animal Health, Nutrition, Technology & Innovation (AHNTI) conference.

“We're working with selected cardiologists in Germany, Austria and Switzerland to make sure that the real-life accuracy of that test matches what we're able to create in a laboratory environment,” she said.

The test is based on microRNAs, which are short RNA molecules that regulate gene expression and are increasingly investigated as disease biomarkers in human medicine.

MI:RNA Diagnostics’ platform combines molecular profiling with machine learning models that are trained to identify microRNA patterns associated with cardiac disease.

“Within the next few months, we're going to have a really amazing collection of samples for us to test, to verify that the machine learning models are working [optimally],” Dr. Hanks said.

To support development of the platform, the company is also building a dataset of cardiac biomarker profiles through its multi-centre MIRACLE study.

“We've got 2,000 patients enrolled in that study already, but we hope to get up to close to 4,000 patients,” she said. “We have over 50,000 data points that we're modelling in our machine learning algorithms, and it's a multi-centre cardiologist-led project across three different continents.”

Diagnosing feline HCM remains a major challenge.

Currently, screening generally relies on echocardiography. As this imaging procedure is not routinely available in primary veterinary clinics, cats with HCM can remain undiagnosed until the disease has significantly worsened.

“There isn't as much work done in diagnostics in the feline space,” said Dr. Hanks. “So it can be hard to bring forward the correct therapies because a lot of diseases are hidden.”

This diagnostic bottleneck has implications for the broader feline therapeutic landscape. Without reliable early detection, the can be challenging to for drugmakers to intervene.

“If we're able to work together pharma on the therapeutic side and then the diagnostics and biomarker side, then we should be able to improve the therapeutic landscape just by knowing when disease is there and using existing drugs,” she said.

MI:RNA Diagnostics is also positioning its technology as a broader biomarker discovery platform. One potential next target is osteoarthritis, which is considered significantly underdiagnosed in cats.

“One of the areas we're going to be working on is osteoarthritis, and a blood sample or urine sample for osteoarthritis in some of our species, which hide that disease well, such as cats, could really revolutionise their entire experience of being alive,” Dr. Hanks said.

Veterinary diagnostics has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting a wider shift towards biomarker-driven diagnostics for companion animals. However, much of that innovation has typically focused on dogs.

This might be changing. MI:RNA Diagnostics’ platform is expected to become the first molecular diagnostics for a HCM, a major feline cardiac disease.

This paves the way to much earlier diagnosis, even without obvious symptoms (we all know how well cats mask physical discomfort) and less reliance on specialist imaging like echocardiography.

Here are three potential implications of the anticipated launch of MI:RNA Diagnostics’ platform:

If validated and adopted, this platform could:

In other words, MI:RNA Diagnostics could expand the diagnosable feline HCM population, a key bottleneck.

Demand for diagnostics often follows new therapeutics. For years, diagnosing early HCM offered limited clinical value because no disease-modifying treatments existed.

However, this changed in March 2025, when the FDA granted conditional approval to TriviumVet’s felycin-CA1 (sirolimus delayed-release tablets) for the management of ventricular hypertrophy in cats with subclinical HCM. The drug is the first approved therapy for feline HCM.

Diagnostics and therapeutics for feline cardiology may begin reinforcing each other:

At the same time, pharmaceutical companies may benefit from expanded diagnostics such as MI:RNA’s platform. Even if the prevalence of a disease is high, the commercial market remains small if diagnosis rates are low.

The launch of MI:RNA’s platform could significantly increase the number of diagnosed cases, potentially leading to an expansion of the addressable market for felycin-CA1.

The two innovations may eventually form a new HCM care pathway:

Adoption of MI:RNA Diagnostics’ platform will depend on several factors:

Overall, the use of microRNAs may still be early-stage in feline medicine, but it’s definitely a space worth watching closely.