New asthma tests coming from Sweden
Funding / Healthcare
Stockholm, Sweden, 23 August 2005
A Karolinska Institutet spin-out, Aerocrine AB, raised 160 million Swedish kronor (€17M) from investors to finance the launch of its flagship asthma-test product in Europe.
Company Databank
Aerocrine AB
Where: Stockholm, http://www.aerocrine.se
Field: Medical devices - measuring asthma severity in exhaled nitric oxide
Stage: Sales under way, clinical product cleared in US and Canada; consumer product cleared in Europe and on sale in Finland.
Vitals: Founded 1997; Karolinska spin-out; reported 2004 net loss SEK 78.5 million on sales of SEK 11.4 million.
Science base: Research with Profs. Lars Gustafsson, Kjell Alving, Eddie Weitzberg and Jan and Jon Lundberg of Karolinska Instittutet.
Investors include: Swedestart Life Science fund of CapMan, HealthCap, Investor Investment Novare Ltd., Scandinavian Life Science Venture, the H&B Capital and Life Equity Sweden funds of GZ Group, and 250 other, minor investors.
Background
The product, NIOX MINO, is a new departure in routine asthma therapy that, the company says, will help doctors better tailor treatments to the individual. In asthma, a constant problem is trying to avoid under-medicating or over-dosing the patient - especially a young child - with steroids, broncho-dilators and other powerful drugs. Aerocrine bills its approach as an inexpensive, routine way for a patient to measure precisely the severity of asthmatic inflammation from day to day, so that the medicine doses can be adjusted accordingly.
The work stems from research at Karolinska in the early 1990s which found that inflammation - as in asthma - can be detected in the levels of nitric oxide exhaled by a patient. Following on from that, Aerocrine has developed a hand-held device that measures the amount of the gas in a patient's breath. The company won US FDA clearance for routine clinical use of a doctor's-office model in May 2003, and approval in Canada in October 2004. But the bigger market prize is the consumer model, NIOX MINO, for which the company received EU clearance as a medical device in April 2004. The consumer product first went on sale in October 2004, in Finland.
The new financing will give Aerocrine a war chest to market the product in Sweden and other European countries, the company said. Of the SEK 160 million raised, SEK 30 million comes from the Swedestart Life Science fund of CapMan. The remainder comes from existing shareholders HealthCap, Investor Investment Novare Ltd., Scandinavian Life Science Venture, the H&B Capital and Life Equity Sweden funds of GZ Group, and 250 other, minor investors.
Aerocrine was founded in 1997 by five researchers, including Profs. Lars Gustafsson and Kjell Alving, at Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet. Based in Stockholm, it reported for the first quarter of 2005 a net loss of SEK 17.6 million on sales of SEK 2.2 million.
