NEW YORK (360Dx) – Sphingotec today announced that it has closed a €20 million ($23 million) growth equity financing round led by international healthcare investors HBM Partners and Wellington Partners.
The firm, based in Hennigsdorf, Germany, said that it will use the proceeds in part to support rolling out its fully automated IB10 point-of-care platform, which enables use of a broad panel of acute blood biomarkers. Sphingotec took ownership of the IB10 microfluidic immunoassay platform — which automatically separates plasma from whole blood for further analyses — by acquiring Samsung-subsidiary Nexus Dx for an undisclosed amount in May.
The firm said that more than 1,000 intensive care units, emergency departments, small hospitals, and large practices in Europe and the Middle East are already using its IB10 POC platform for more than 100,000 tests per year.
Sphingotec said that it will make two biomarker assays available on the POC platform for ICUs and emergency departments — its adrenomedullin (bio-ADM) biomarker of endothelial integrity that indicates when blood vessels become leaky, and its proenkephalin (penKid) kidney function biomarker that provides direct information on the glomerular filtration rate in high-risk patients. The penKid biomarker can diagnose and monitor acute kidney injury (AKI) in the earliest stages of congestion leading to acute heart failure (AHF), the firm said.
The investment "enables us to bring our innovative biomarkers much faster to ICUs and emergency departments, where they can support decision-making in diagnostically underserved conditions such as septic shock, acute heart failure, and acute kidney injury," Andreas Bergmann, Sphingotec's CEO and founder, said in a statement. "Starting in Central Europe, a growing distributor network will allow the timely introduction of a complete solution for the hospital acute point-of-care market in AKI, AHF, and sepsis diagnosis and monitoring."
As a result of the new financing, a number of people will join Sphingotec's board — Matthias Fehr, an investment advisor at HBM Partners; Rainer Strohmenger, a managing partner at Wellington Partners; Ute Kilger, partner at Boehmert & Boehmert; Method Miklus, former COO of BRAHMS; and Gerald Möller, former CEO of Boehringer.