A Medical Device Daily

Freedom Meditech (La Jolla, California), the developer of non-invasive ophthalmic medical device technologies for people with diabetes, reported that the company closed on the second round of its Series A financing. The amount of financing was not disclosed.

The financing included participation from existing backer JumpStart Ventures and various individual investors. Also investing and joining the Freedom Meditech board was Catherine Stiefel, long-time Director of Stiefel Laboratories (Coral Gables, Florida), which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline (London) for a reported $3.6 billion in July.

"We believe that this additional investment in the company is a vote of confidence in our innovative approach for painlessly and non-invasively measuring daily glucose levels from the eye," said Craig Misrach, president/CEO of Freedom Meditech. "We are encouraged with preliminary results from our glucose prediction pre-clinical trial and plan to present these results at scientific meetings in the coming months. With the full subscription to this round, we intend to achieve several product development milestones within our growing diabetes medical device product portfolio, while also communicating our respective clinical protocols and study results to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration."

Freedom Meditech employs non-invasive, patented, biophotonic, technologies to assess the health of people with diabetes. The company is currently developing a portable ophthalmic daily glucose measurement device that could provide an alternative to the current "finger stick" method. The hand-held device is designed to provide an immediate glucose level by shining a light in the eye. The device's planned ease of use is intended to increase adherence to physician-directed glucose monitoring guidelines, and to help reduce the incidence of costly long-term complications of diabetes.

The company said that initial studies have demonstrated high accuracy and repeatability at low levels of glucose concentration (when hypoglycemic blackouts can occur), a capability that has historically posed a challenge to other technological approaches. The company is also leveraging its expertise in ophthalmic equipment commercialization and endocrine care to develop other non-invasive medical device products for diabetes diagnosis and management.