Date: 2011-01-26
Type of information: Fundraising
Company: Microvisk Technologies (UK)
Investors: Porton Capital, Oxford Technology Management, New Hill ( Boston , USA ), Midven, the Rainbow Seed Fund, Finance Wales and private investors.
Amount: £6 million (€ 7.02 million )
Funding type: rights issue to existing investors
Planned used: Microvisk is gearing up to launch its Smartstrip® device onto the UK market this autumn. The company is using the new capital to continue clinical trials in the UK and expand its research and manufacturing facilities as well as recruiting additional scientists and manufacturing staff. Microvisk is also preparing to commence trials in the USA and Germany within the next six months, with product launches in both countries anticipated to follow in 2012. The Microvisk SmartStrip® enables patients to test their blood clotting capacity at home, in the same way as diabetics test for glucose. As such, it reflects the trend towards healthcare monitoring in the home. In the past two years, the US and German healthcare systems have introduced payments to all at-risk Warfarin users to do weekly home blood tests, rather than having to go to the doctor or hospital clinic. To date, only three companies have developed a test system for blood coagulation that can be used in a doctor’s surgery and although certified for home use, market research shows that doctors feel that they are insufficiently robust and too complex for home use. The Microvisk SmartStrip® is unique in the blood clotting diagnostic world as a solid state system that is robust and simple to use at home. It also requires far less blood than other systems, which means less pain for the user. The coagulation status (clotting speed) of the patient is measured by tiny multi-layered paddles on the surface of the strip and a memory chip ensures the device is calibrated to provide the highest levels of accuracy.
Others: Microvisk Technologies, the developer of a handheld system to monitor the blood clotting status of patients taking the drug Warfarin, has raised £6 million through a rights issue to existing investors in an oversubscribed round. This is the third successful funding round for Microvisk, which has secured £10.5m in the past 12 months - the largest amount raised by a UK life science company. A spin-out company from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Microvisk has developed the world’s first medical diagnostic strip based on a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) that was originally created as a movement system for nano-robots. Microvisk’s ‘SmartStrip®’ is a disposable strip that uses embedded sensors to work out the clotting speed of blood from a finger prick sample and the results are displayed on a handheld reader.
Therapeutic area: Cardiovascular diseases -Hematological diseases
