Embo Medical (Galway, Ireland) ,an early stage medical device company focused on developing technology to shut down blood flow in blood vessels, has secured €3 million in seed-funding.

The investment syndicate included the AIB Seed Capital Fund (managed by Enterprise Equity), Irrus Investments, HBAN's Medtech Business Angel Syndicate, Western Development Commission, Enterprise Ireland and the AIB Start-Up Accelerator Fund (managed by ACT Venture Capital). The investment will enable Embo Medical to secure regulatory approval and enter the market, and in doing so employ approximately 10 people directly and up to another 10 people indirectly.

Embo Medical is based in National University of Ireland Galway's Business Innovation Center. In 2011, the management team of Wayne Allen, Colin Forde and Liam Mullins undertook the BioInnovate Ireland Fellowship, a specialist medical device innovation programe. Upon completion, they founded Embo Medical to develop solutions to unmet clinical needs that were identified while observing embolization procedures in hospitals during the Fellowship.

Embolization is a minimally invasive endovascular procedure used to deliberately stop blood flow in blood vessels when treating cancers, internal haemorrhage, aneurysms, and venous disease. Current embolization procedures require multiple coils and plugs, which can be cumbersome and time consuming to insert and often do not provide an optimal clinical result.

Embo is developing the first true one-shot (one device per vessel) vascular embolization device. The product is aimed at the peripheral vascular embolization market, a market where physicians perform about 180,000 procedures per year worldwide. The Embo platform technology is intended to provide a superior solution in shorter procedural times; resulting in safe, cost-effective embolization. In preclinical studies, Embo's technology reduced blood vessel treatment time by over 80%, while ensuring rapid and durable occlusion across all blood vessel sizes.

Mahmood Razavi, Interventional Radiologist and Director of Clinical Trials, St. Joseph Heart & Vascular Center Orange, California, said: "The innovative Embo solution combines the desirable characteristics of coils and plugs into one device and represents a potential new gold standard in embolization. It is designed for safe and easy delivery, and rapid cessation of blood flow. The technology will be a clinically effective approach for patients requiring embolization."

The company outsources manufacture, packaging and sterilisation to med-tech companies based primarily in the West of Ireland.

EOS imaging moves into SE Asia market

EOS imaging (Paris), a maker of 2-D/3-D orthopedic medical imaging, reported the company's continued growth in the South East Asian market with the installation of an EOS imaging system at the Medic Medical Center (MMC) in Ho Chi Minh City. MMC is the largest radiologic center and medical clinic in Vietnam.

MMC is Vietnam's most active medical facility in terms of patient volume, providing service to more than 1,000 patients per day, and offers a wide range of specialized services, such as pediatrics, endocrinology, cardiology and neurology. MMC's network of facilities provides medical services in numerous provinces throughout the country but also in Laos and Cambodia.

Phan Thanh Hai, Director of the Medic Medical Center at Ho Chi Minh City, said, "As one of the largest medical centers in Vietnam, we must continually seek out proven technologies that will help provide our physicians with the best diagnostic information and our patients with the best treatment outcomes. Our decision to add the EOS system's low dose 2D/3D imaging satisfies both of those objectives and enables our hospital to continue operating as one of Vietnam's premier medical facilities."

The EOS system provides full-body images of patients in a natural functional position in both 2-D and 3-D with 50% to 85% less dose than digital radiology and 95% less dose than basic CT scans, in accordance with the ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle of radiation reduction.

EOS makes the EOS, a medical imaging system, based on technology that enabled George Charpak to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.