CAPS Medical, of Netanya, Israel, closed a $3.5 million series A round led by Chasing Value Asset Management and the Los Angeles-based Israel Investment Fund Group. The new funds will be used to enable CAPS to undertake its first clinical trial for its minimally invasive, nonthermal plasma device for cancer treatment and further develop its portfolio for the treatment of solid tumors.
PERTH, Australia – Startup Inventia Life Science Pty. Ltd. has received two major investments from the Australian government to accelerate the development of a robotic device that prints a patient’s own skin cells directly onto a burn or wound. Named Ligō from the Latin “to bind,” the device could revolutionize the way surgeons approach wound repair.
By deleting the gene for uridine monophosphate synthetase (UMPS), an enzyme in the pathway for uridine synthesis, researchers have made cells, including embryonic stem cells and T cells, dependent on dietary uridine. The work, which was published in the July 13, 2020, online issue of Nature Biotechnology, adds a new potential way of controlling cell therapies.
Endpoint Health Inc. has made its official debut, scooping up $12 million in debt and equity financing from a host of investors, including Mayfield, Y Combinator, Ame Cloud Ventures and Wireframe Ventures. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is focused on helping people with illnesses such as sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) – life-threatening conditions often caused by serious infections, including COVID-19.
Mastor SAS secured €3 million (US$3.39 million) in seed investment from Sofinnova Partners' MD Start III Fund and €1.9 million in non-dilutive funding through the i-Nov Innovation Award from BPI France, the French national public investment bank.
Protaryx Medical has picked up $8.3 million to develop its device for precision transseptal access to the left atrium for use during structural heart and catheter ablation procedures. The funding includes nondilutive grants and a seed round totaling $3.2 million, as well as the recently closed $5.1 million series A financing led by Ajax Health, with participation from returning investor University of Maryland (UM) Ventures.
TORONTO – Once he’d enrolled in an entrepreneurial engineering course, third-year medical school student Gabriel Georges’ task was deceptively simple: come up with a device to meet an unmet medical need. Before long, Georges had pulled two other students with engineering and investor relations smarts into the project, developing a minimally invasive, long-term transcatheter heart pump that this month garnered financing from Canadian and U.S. investors.
LONDON – Sirakoss Ltd. has received FDA 510(k) clearance for its nanoparticle synthetic bone graft substitute, after showing the ready-to-use putty is equivalent to the CE-approved dry formulation. Rather than granules that are mixed with a patient’s blood before administration, the inorganic calcium phosphate-based Osteo3 Zp putty consists of the granules suspended in a fully synthetic resorbable carrier.
Whole genome sequencing is not part of treating patients in practice – or even involved in most clinical trials of drug candidates. But C2i Genomics Inc. is working to make that a reality. It applies pattern recognition to whole genome sequencing to create an individualized fingerprint for a given patient’s tumor. The New York-based startup has raised a $12 million series A round to back the development of its technology, which came out of Cornell and the New York Genome Center.
Boston-based startup Cerevasc Inc. scooped up $43.9 million in a series A round that was led by Perceptive Xontogeny Venture (PXV) Fund and Aton Partners LLC. The funds are earmarked to support a first-in-human trial of the company’s Eshunt system for the treatment of hydrocephalus, as well as subsequent clinical studies to support regulatory approvals.