And the dealmaking has begun.
Woodridge, Illinois-based connected health company Endotronix announced Monday, as the 35th annual J.P. Morgan Conference officially began in San Francisco, that it has raised $12 million in debt from Silicon Valley Bank.
The news comes roughly six months on the heels of another fundraising round at the heart-failure treatment company when it announced that it had raised $32 million in equity financing from a syndicate of investors including BioVenture Investors, SV Life Sciences (SVLS), Lumira Capital, Aperture Venture Partners, and OSF Ventures. Existing investors, and an unnamed corporate investor, also participated in that June Series C round of investment.
The current $12 million will be used to “expand our clinical development program more quickly and support our growth as we ramp up for commercialization outside the US in 2018,” wrote Harry Rowland, the CEO of Endotronix in an email forwarded by a representative.
“We’re pleased to partner with Endotronix as they advance their end-to-end patient management solution for chronic heart failure,” said Tom Hertzberg, Director, Life Science and Healthcare, Silicon Valley Bank, in a news release. “We believe the patient-centered Cordella System can help streamline care and improve outcomes while decreasing healthcare costs. We look forward to being a part of Endotronix’s futuresuccess.”
Endotronix’s Cordella Heart Failure System combines a cloud-based disease management data and outpatient hemodynamic management with a novel, implantable, wireless pulmonary artery sensor for early detection of worsening heart failure.
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.
Measuring the pressure of the pulmonary artery has been widely used in hospitals as a way to accurately evaluate the status of a patient’s heart failure. But up until Atlanta startup CardioMEMS (later acquired by St. Jude Medical, which last week formally became part of Abbott) no one had successfully managed to find an at-home version that would not require a patient to come to the hospital to get those measurements and could alert of worsening heart failure remotely.
While CardioMEMS’s sensor and FDA approval were hailed widely and the device has shown that it can dramatically reduce hospital readmissions related to congestive heart failure, it has still to prove itself in the world of reimbursement. Many regional Medicare Administrative Contractors have declined to cover the expensive device.
That is the reimbursement precedent on the hardware side, but Endotronix’s CEO has previously said that as more long-term data becomes available on St. Jude’s CardioMEMS device, Medicare will ultimately cover it. In the meantime, Endotronix is also hoping to leverage it care management platform as a way to reduce the load of overworked cardiology practices.
The remote monitoring piece of the digital strategy can pull data from devices in the home — blood pressure, pulse oximeter, weighing machines and heart rate monitors and when approved its sensor device — and make that data available to cardiology teams that include cardiologists, nurses and care coordinators. But the software can also allow patients and care team to communicate.
“On the clinician’s back end, it’s about organizing that information in a meaningful way, having protocolized care that integrates that information so there’s routine follow-up when it needs to happen and then urgent follow-up also when that needs to happen,” Rowland said, in an interview in July.
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