As MedCity News reported yesterday, Gauss Surgical raised $3.4 million just a few months after it secured FDA 510(k) clearance for a digital health app that measures blood loss during surgery based on the amount of blood stored in cannisters.
In a phone interview with MedCity News, Gauss Surgical CEO Dr. Milton McColl confirmed that the latest funding is an extension of its Series A round and will be used to for sales and marketing support of the roll out of its latest app.
Promus Ventures led the round and its founding partner, Mike Collett, will serve as a board observer on Gauss Surgical’s board of directors. It’s an interesting move for an investment firm more known for its tech investments in companies like AngelList and Storify. Summation Health Ventures also participated in this round. Gauss has raised $12 million to date, McColl said.
One area in which the company sees a lot of potential for its app is obstetrics. Maternal hemmorhaging during childbirth is always a risk, but advances in data collection have revealed it’s an increasing cause of concern. The problem with the current practice of weighing sponges to estimate blood loss is that other fluids come into play, making the process time-consuming and inefficient.
Patients with serious burns are also a significant area of interest because they tend to have a lot of transfusions. McColl said procedures associated with heavy blood loss such as orthopedic, cardiovascular and pediatric surgery are also a good fit for its app.
He noted that the company has seen a rise in queries from prospective investors, particularly corporates and strategics. For medtech companies, there’s a big push to offer services to hospitals. A large number are trying to figure out a digital health strategy that solves a specific problem for customers,” he said. “They don’t want to offer a widget; they want to solve a problem.”
Update: This article has been updated from an earlier version.
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.
