8th February 2012

Acuitas Medical secures major investment to bring its proprietary fineSA

 

South Wales UK-based Acuitas Medical Limited has completed a major seven figure funding round which will enable the company to accelerate its clinical validation and workflow integration programmes with disease signature biomarkers, initially for liver, lung, brain and bone pathologies.

Latest research using the company’s patented fineSA software, conducted by Professor Diego Martin at the University of Arizona, Tucson USA, and Professor Juliet Compston at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge UK, have respectively demonstrated the potential for the early diagnosis of liver fibrosis and osteoporosis.

Acuitas Medical’s chief executive, and co-founder of the company Peter E Taylor, said he was delighted that all of the company’s existing private and institutional investors, including Altima Partners and Finance Wales, had invested once again to complete an oversubscribed funding round. He added: “Over the past six months there have been two areas of focus for Acuitas Medical: to secure ISO 13485 accreditation covering our software development programmes and procedures – this we have achieved, confirming our ability to develop tools that meet strict regulatory compliance. We are working on clinical validation with some of the finest groups in the world, bringing the company to the point where we can now realistically see our proprietary technology in daily clinical use as a game-changing radiology decision support tool.”

fineSA provides an add-on sequence to standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enabling soft tissue structures to be sampled at up to 40 times the spatial resolution of conventional MRI; fineSA data can be acquired in as little as 15 seconds in a typically busy clinical setting. It therefore significantly increases the information available from MRI – it is fast, safe and non-invasive and allows for repeat scans, for example in monitoring treatment efficacy.

Over the past three years the company has attracted to its clinical and technology advisory board some key scientists and clinicians in the field of medical imaging, including as Chairman Professor Sir Michael Brady, a prominent imaging scientist, medical technology entrepreneur and Fellow of the Royal Society. Sir Michael was the founder of Mirada Solutions which was sold to CTI Molecular Imaging in 2003 (then CTI was in turn acquired by Siemens in 2005); he is the holder of 26 patents in computer vision, robotics, medical image analysis and artificial intelligence.

Sir Michael, commenting on Acuitas Medical’s funding and breakthrough technology stated, “This successful funding round will enable the company to demonstrate the clinical efficacy of fineSA in a range of diseases. The continued support of the existing shareholders, and the recruitment of new ones, especially in the currently difficult financial climate, illustrates the strength of the Acuitas Medical proposition and the promise of a novel diagnostic tool to augment existing MRI examinations.”
Commenting on the initial results of the liver work conducted with Professor Diego Martin, he said: “Though liver disease is serious, it can be cured if it is detected and treated early enough. Already clinical trials are showing that fineSA can detect fine structures in the liver that correspond to the earliest signs of liver disease, much earlier than can be seen with conventional MRI. Equally exciting, fineSA promises to detect textural changes in brain structures that are believed to correlate with the onset of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”

Acuitas Medical showcased its works-in-progress fineSA technology at the Quantitative Imaging Reading Room (QIRR) at the November 2011 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago, with some of the early clinical results that underpin its claims for fineSA.
Dr Richard Thompson the investment manager at Finance Wales who worked on the round added: “This is the third time we’ve backed Acuitas Medical and it takes our total investment to over £1 million. We continue to be impressed by Acuitas’ technology as well as the drive and vision of its management team. The recent showcase at RSNA in Chicago reinforced what a bright future the company has.”