A Medical Device Daily

Activaero (Gemuenden, Germany), a company involved in the field of controlled breathing technologies for inhaled therapeutic agents, reported closing a Series A financing totalling €10.7 million ($16 million). The international consortium was led by BioMedPartners (advising BioMedInvest LP II) and included VI Partners, Abalis Finance and Vesalius Biocapital I SICAR. The transaction was advised by MedVenture Partners.

The company said the financing enables it to further develop its proprietary inhalation devices and strengthen business development activities for Activaero's leading controlled inhalation technologies.

"Securing venture capital support for Activaero is important for our strategy to further increase visibility and awareness within the pharmaceutical industry and provide superior products and technologies to our collaboration partners," said Gerhard Scheuch, CEO of Activaero. "The development and commercialization of our products and technology is now securely funded going forward."

Gerhard Ries of BioMedPartners, Arnd Kaltofen of VI Partners, Jean-Marie Luechinger of Abalis Finance, Christian Schneider of Vesalius Biocapital Partners and John Patton, founder of Nektar Therapeutics, have all joined Activaero's supervisory board.

AMT to develop LPLChip with Progenika

Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics (AMT; Amsterdam, Netherlands) and Progenika Biopharma (Vizkaya, Spain) have entered into a development and commercialization agreement for LPLchip, a diagnostic tool to rapidly diagnose patients with complete and partial lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD). AMT has developed Glybera as a gene therapy for patients with this disease.

In June, AMT reported new clinical data showing that a one-time administration of its lead product Glybera results in significant long-term health benefits for LPLD patients. Long-term follow-up data from two clinical trials with complete LPLD patients show that Glybera therapy results in a significant and clinically important reduction in acute pancreatitis, the most debilitating complication of the disease. The data also confirm that the therapy is well-tolerated and safe. AMT intends to file Glybera for marketing approval with EMEA by the end of this year.

LPLchip based on the Progenika's DNA-chip technology, will be used to rapidly diagnose patients with complete and partial LPLD and will be important to effectively identify patients that could benefit from Glybera.

AMT has selected Progenika as a partner for the development of LPLchip because of what it said is the company's "long-standing expertise in the development of diagnostic chips and its access to both European and North American markets."

Jorn Aldag, CEO of AMT said, "LPLchip will be an important tool in early patient diagnosis, enabling us to make Glybera available to the right patients as quickly as possible."

"This collaborative project demonstrates how DNA-based diagnostics and highly targeted gene therapy can be combined to bring personalized medicine to patient groups whose medical needs were previously unmet," added Antonio Martinez, CEO of Progenika Biopharma.

HYPERImage project achieves milestone

As leader of the European Union-funded HYPERImage research project, Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) reported that the project has achieved a major milestone in its ambitious plan to create a new medical imaging technique called hybrid PET/MR. This new technique is based on the simultaneous acquisition of time-of-flight PET and MR images.

The project involves eight partners from six European countries and has a total budget of around 17 million. The ultimate goals of the project are to advance the accuracy of diagnostic imaging in cardiology and oncology and open up new fields in therapy planning, guidance and response monitoring.

A hybrid PET/MR scanner could simultaneously deliver the anatomical and functional information achievable using state-of-the-art MR scanners (e.g. soft tissue contrast and physiological processes in blood vessels) and the molecular imaging information provided by PET. As a result, it would combine the best of both worlds, which could ultimately help to pinpoint and characterize disease sites within the body more accurately than is currently possible.

For a hybrid scanner that offers simultaneous PET and MR image acquisition, two fundamental problems need to be solved: the development of MR-compatible PET detectors and a method of accounting for PET attenuation (the scattering of high-energy gamma rays generated by the PET tracers by parts of the human body).

The milestone that the HYPERImage team has reached is the development of a functional gamma-ray detector that meets the performance requirements of the latest time-of-flight PET scanners. The new gamma-ray detectors have been designed to be compatible with the strong static and dynamic magnetic fields that would be present in a combined PET/MR scanner. Furthermore, the team has achieved major progress with respect to MRI-based static and dynamic PET attenuation correction.

"Understanding the molecular mechanisms associated with cardiovascular disease and cancer, and the development of technologies focused on the early detection of these disease processes are the two main challenges of biomedical research," said Valentin Fuster, Director of the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (Madrid, Spain) and the Cardiovascular Institute at the Mount Sinai Medical Center (New York). "I am convinced that the realization of a PET/MR technology platform will significantly help to improve the precision and the moment at which disease is diagnosed, two critical parameters for the successful treatment of many diseases."

"The HYPERImage team's combined expertise in semiconductor physics, signal processing and medical scanner design, together with its expert clinical knowledge, have moved the project an important step forward in the development of a new imaging tool that is intended to help clinicians diagnose and treat some of the world's most prevalent killer diseases, such as breast cancer," said Henk van Houten, senior VP of Philips Research and head of Philips' healthcare research program. "I am proud to say that proof-of-concept of an MR-compatible PET detector took the team less than 1.5 years to achieve. It clearly demonstrates that good collaborations lead to very fast progress."