CLEVELAND, Ohio — CardioInsight Technologies has closed its second funding round, raising $6 million from new and existing investors to speed up and expand testing and commercialization of its heart-mapping technology.
Existing investors Draper Triangle Ventures and Case Technology Ventures participated in the round, as did new investor Dr. Michel Haissaguerre, a French electrophysiologist, CardioInsight said in a release. Company management also participated.
“This infusion of capital will accelerate commercialization of our transformative mapping technology, allowing doctors to more accurately, quickly and effectively diagnose and treat cardiac arrhythmia and congestive heart failure,” said Steve Arless, CardioInsight’s CEO, in the release.
CardioInsight’s electrocardiographic mapping technology gathers electrical information about the heart from an electrode “vest” placed on a patient’s body and combines that information with images from a CT scan to produce 3-D maps of the electrical activity of the heart. Unlike conventional methods, CardioInsight’s technology is noninvasive and provides beat-by-beat, whole-heart mapping.
Once commercialized, the technology — the sensor array and software to collect, analyze and combine its data with the CT image — could help diagnose and treat electrical abnormalities of the heart.
The technology’s strengths in guiding the treatment of arrhythmia and heart failure have been demonstrated in more than 125 pre-procedural and intra-procedural patient studies at clinical centers including University Hospitals of Cleveland, Loyola Chicago and Hôpital Cardiologique du Haut–Lévèque in Bordeaux, France, the company said.
CardioInsight will use the investment to speed up and expand its clinical studies program to include new centers such as the Cleveland Clinic and the Penn Medicine Hospital University of Pennsylvania. The company also will use the money to finish developing its first commercial system, which is targeted for regulatory approval and market release in 2011, according to the release.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
CardioInsight got its start in 2006 with $750,000 in funding from Draper Triangle, the Pittsburgh office of Midwestern venture capital fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson, JumpStart Inc., the nonprofit venture development organization in Cleveland and the technology transfer office of Case Western Reserve University, also in Cleveland.
The company also received about $350,000 in 2008 from the Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center, a consortium led by the Cleveland Clinic.
Its technology springs from research conducted over the past two decades by former Case researcher Yoram Rudy. The university spun off the technology to CardioInsight in 2006, where Charu Ramanathan and Ping Jia — two of Rudy’s former doctoral students, now biomedical engineers — initially developed and tested it.
Ramanathan is CardioInsight’s vice president of business and clinical development.
Arless is a 35-year veteran of medical device development, marketing and sales. He was president of London-based medical technology developer Smith & Nephew Inc. for five years, spending a total of 17 years at that company.
