Date: Aug 08, 2014 Source: MedCityNews (
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Stanford University spinout Nirmidas Biotech has raised $2 million in seed funding to commercialize its fluorescence technology that enhances 100-fold a researcher's ability to detect disease biomarkers, said the company's R&D director Joshua Robinson.
It's meant to pick up the subtle traces found in blood from early-stage cancer or hard-to-read autoimmune disorders -- conditions that typically use fluorescent dye tests.
The round's investors include "a prominent VC firm" and a life science angel investor that both wish to remain unnamed, and the Stanford-StartX Fund.
The science comes from the lab of Dr. Hongjie Dai, a chemistry chair at Stanford, who has published extensively about the technology.
The technology's platform is made up of "an ultra-thin, film-like fluorescence enhancing plasmonic gold coating," the company said. It continues:
This enables increased sensitivity, higher signal to noise ratio, high degree of multiplexing and improved specificity, potentially leading to more rapid and accurate early-stage disease diagnoses incorporated into wearable healthcare, a market that is estimated to eventually be in excess of $2 billion dollars.
The company's short term plan is to make its better-than-the-average dye available to the greater research community. But in the long run, Nirmidas plans to develop its own diagnostics tests that are based on this fluorescent dye technology, Robinson said.
"We're looking out for diseases where we really address a need, and we're trying to identify where there's the greatest need to improve the signal strength," he said. "Basically, we're looking for any disease where you have to be very sensitive, and pick up information from a sample that's very dilute, or very rare against a large background."
For instance, if a patient has early-stage cancer, it might be difficult to cast a net to find the sporadic circulating tumor cell. With Nirmidas' technology, the fluorescent dye would be able to zero in on these cells more easily.
Some of the seed funding will go to help commercialize the company's existing technology.
"But the bulk of funding will go toward key hives in engineering, and biologists with a background in diagnostics," Nirmidas said. "We're really looking for people with an understanding of the regulatory pathway to help us develop that next generation of diagnostics technology."
