Owlstone Medical Ltd, Cambridge, UK, has successfully raised $11.55 million in financing. The investment round was led by existing investors, and will be used to commercially launch the company’s breath biomarker research and development services, including the opening of a new high-volume clinical facility, and to fund ongoing clinical trials in lung and colon cancer screening. The funding follows the original investment of $7 million that spun Owlstone Medical out in June 2016.
Owlstone Medical is leveraging proprietary and proven field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) technology in its disease breathalyzer product range. FAIMS measures disease-specific volatile organic compound (VOC) metabolites in patient’s breath or body fluids. Measurement of VOC biomarkers allows noninvasive 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 FAIMS technology and breath biopsy as a new diagnostic modality,” says Billy Boyle, cofounder and CEO at Owlstone Medical. “We’ve made fantastic progress in our LuCID lung cancer trial, which will recruit up to 3,000 patients across 21 sites in the UK and Europe, making it the world’s largest breath-based study ever undertaken for early cancer detection. The commercial launch of our R&D services will, for the first time, allow clinical and pharma partners to easily identify breath biomarkers for novel diagnostics and precision medicine applications.”
Christofer Toumazou, Imperial College London.
“Owlstone Medical has made tremendous progress in clinical trials for the diagnosis of colon and lung cancer, which are two of the biggest cancer killers worldwide,” says Christofer Toumazou, regius professor of engineering at Imperial College, London, and advisor and nonexecutive director of Owlstone Medical. “I am delighted that with this additional investment, we are a step closer to making breath biopsy a reality for patients.”
For more information, visit Owlstone Medical.
