The founders of Verinata Health – the prenatal diagnostics testmaker acquired by Illumina in 2013 for $350 million – have a stealth new startup in the works. And it’s attracting some significant capital.
MicroMedicine has raised the first, $6 million tranche of a committed $35 million round, according to a regulatory filing. The funding comes a large pension fund based in Turkey, a person familiar with the startup said in a phone interview.
It’s using simple microfluidics tools to process large volumes of samples, and isolate certain cellular components. The company will focus on isolating certain blood and bone marrow cell populations, to work on applications in diagnostics, therapeutics and wound care.
It “enables pristine separation of blood cells for use in infection imaging and tissue regeneration,” and could be used as a research tool.
The funding committed is sufficient to allow MicroMedicine to commercialize its product,
The company is a spinout of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Its CEO is Ravi Kapur, entrepreneur in residence at MGH; also cofounding the company are Ron Tompkins, chief of the hospital’s burn unit, and Mehmet Toner, a Harvard Medical School surgery professor and founding director of the NIH BioMEMS Resource Center.
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.
The trio helped launch Verinata Health, back when it was based in Massachusetts and known as Living Microsystems.
[Image from Flickr user Andrew Mason]
