NexMR and Rhovica Neuroimaging win Venture Kick’s second stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their projects aim to facilitate the study of challenging systems and assist biotechs in their journey to address unmet medical needs, enable a safe and fast external ventricular drain insertion that prevents devastating complications.
NexMR: NMR-based fragment screening made easy
Fragment-based drug design(FBDD) successfully brought over forty drugs to the clinics and four to the market. However, state-of-the-art techniques often fail to address the most challenging targets. This is due to the tedious assay development and constraining required sample conditions. Another common problem is the lack of data overlap within the orthogonal methods because experimental conditions may introduce bias. NMR would be an ideal technique but is too slow because of its low sensitivity. Moreover, current methods do not detect the best hits.
NexMR aims to offer solutions delivering fully characterized hits to support drug discovery pipelines. NexMR was co-founded by CEO Felix Torres, Post-Doc at ETH Zürich, and Matthias Bütikofer currently a Ph.D. at the group of Prof Roland Riek who helps them as a scientific advisor and with Anil Sethi, on legal and business negotiations. Thanks to their proprietary technology using sensitivity-enhanced NMR they can screen libraries of thousands of molecules within days. They are also able to characterize the hits without idle time, as their technology encompasses affinity and structure determination. Contrary to state-of-the-art methods (X-ray crystallography, surface plasmon resonance), they only require minimal assay development, allowing them to screen challenging targets which have not been addressed so far. The sample conditions used in NMR are milder and closer to physiological conditions than for other techniques, therefore facilitating the transition to further development. NexMR is committed to supporting drug discovery with highly actionable data. Thanks to their versatile and accessible platform, they aim to facilitate the study of challenging systems and to assist biotechs in their journey to address unmet medical needs. Their goal is to create a footprint of biotechs customers to capture 1.5-3% of the market share and 10-20M turnover.
With the VK stage II, they plan to finalize the pilot product and start early marketing and customer traction. nexmr.com
Rhovica Neuroimaging: integrating miniature sensors in the EVD
Rapid and safe placement of an external ventricular drain (EVD) is a lifesaving emergency procedure. EVDs are thin catheters, that are inserted into the brain cavities (ventricles) for fluid drainage to decrease intracranial pressure (ICP) and for measurement of ICP. Their insertion is one of the most frequent neurosurgical interventions. Today, the trajectory for insertion is chosen mostly solely by superficial anatomical landmarks for saving time. This leads to high misplacement rates with the risk of devastating results due to time delay and injury of functionally important structures. Furthermore, once in place, often follow-CTs are performed, to monitor the ventricle size, with associated risks and costs.
Rhovica Neuroimaging’s innovation solves these problems by integrating sensors in the catheter to
localize the ventricles and allow real-time ventricle monitoring. This enables a safe, fast, and cost-efficient EVD placement and ventricle monitoring with the prevention of devastating complications even in most difficult cases, sparing time, and reducing a high number of head-CT scans and costs. Co-Founders Dr. med. Martin Hlavica (neurosurgeon in Aarau) and Dr. med. univ. Thomas Rhomberg (neurosurgical resident at the University Hospital in Bern) work in collaboration with CSEM.
The team estimates the global market volume for current EVDs today of around 220 million per year. Additional EVD functions, as they will provide, would allow a higher price, leading to a higher market volume.
Venture Kick financing will allow them to pursue the steps on their way to building up their company and will be used for the development of a working prototype within the scope of an Innosuisse Innovation Project.
