Owlstone Medical Ltd, Cambridge, UK, has been spun out of parent company Owlstone Inc to develop and commercialize a breathalyzer for use in clinical diagnostics and precision medicine, with applications in cancer, and inflammatory and infectious disease.
The company announced that it has successfully raised $7 million in financing. Led by Medtekwiz Advisory Ltd, the investment will be used to fund ongoing clinical trials of the breathalyzer in lung and colon cancer screening.
Owlstone Medical has been created to leverage proprietary field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) technology for the advancement of a disease breathalyzer. FAIMS measures disease-specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) appearing as metabolites in a patient’s breath or body fluids. Measurement of VOC biomarkers allows diagnosis of disease at a very early stage, to enable more-effective treatment and better patient outcomes.
Billy Boyle, Owlstone Medical.
“Securing this funding is further validation of our technology, and we are excited to progress our vision to revolutionize the detection and diagnosis of cancer, infectious and inflammatory diseases,” says Billy Boyle, cofounder and CEO at Owlstone Medical. “The breathalyzer we are developing provides clinicians with a highly sensitive, noninvasive diagnostic, which will enable early detection and improve patient outcomes. We are also working with pharma partners to develop noninvasive companion diagnostics to better match patients to treatment for emerging personalized therapies.”
Christofer Toumazou, Imperial College London.
“With the investment, I look forward to seeing a step change in the way serious disease can be diagnosed and monitored, and particularly for colon and lung cancer, which are two of the biggest cancer killers worldwide,” says Christofer Toumazou, Regius professor at Imperial College London and recently appointed Owlstone Medical board member.
“We are very pleased to have completed this transaction with Medtekwiz,” adds Bret Bader, CEO at Owlstone Inc. “Owlstone Inc has developed a revolutionary platform technology that promises to change the delivery of chemical detection solutions in markets that range from defense to medical diagnostics. This transaction and the creation of Owlstone Medical is a template for our strategy of creating market-specific spinouts in order to take a focused approach to solve profound problems.”
For more information, visit Owlstone Medical.
