Company building novel portable stroke MR imaging platform seeks investors
A New Zealand-based company that recently entered the U.S., aiming to roll out a new portable 0.1T MR imaging scanner, is now seeking investors, leaders said Tuesday.
Wellumio in January announced it was expanding into the States with the establishment of California offices, laying the groundwork for local clinical trials to test its device. The company has built a lightweight scanner called Axana, which uses “groundbreaking” technology to rapidly identify areas of brain tissue impacted by stroke.
Currently, only about 5% of patients receive treatment within the critical first hour after onset of symptoms, when the chances of disability-free survival are highest. Wellumio said it hopes the scanner can bring neuroimaging to patient bedsides, reducing time to diagnosis by upward of 90%.
It officially launched a crowdfunding campaign on Sept. 16, seeking interested investors. Wellumio already has raised approximately $4.25 million through an initial seed round, with contributors including Nuance Capital, Outset, Cure Kids Ventures, Movac and NZ Growth Capital Partners.
“Axana is already showing promising results in clinical trials, offering a glimpse of a future where stroke, one of the world’s leading causes of death and disability, can be diagnosed earlier and more accurately,” Mitali Purohit, general partner at Auckland, New Zealand-based Nuance Capital, which led the Series Pre-A investment round, said in a statement. “Wellumio’s technology holds exciting potential not only in stroke, which is the current focus, but also for future applications in a range of brain-related conditions and injuries.”
The company said its scanner is powered by batteries, weighs a little over 100 pounds and requires no contrast agents nor shielded rooms. Wellumio believes the system is ideal for emergency departments, rural hospitals and mobile stroke units, claiming it can cut upward of two hours from diagnosis-to-treatment timelines. Axana relies on patent-pending “pulsed gradient free mapping” technology, which it said has shown promise in early preclinical trials. Scans can produce MRI-based stroke biomarkers in approximately four minutes.
Leaders estimated that the U.S. stroke market represents a roughly $1.5 billion market opportunity. It plans to use seed funding to finalize product development and expand clinical trials into the U.S. Initial experiments have already been conducted at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in conjunction with the Australian Stroke Alliance, the country’s largest such network focused on this clinical concern. Wellumio announced the enrollment of the first patient in February.
“We’ve already received strong early interest from clinical networks and hospital heads, and this investment will allow us to accelerate our transition to commercial readiness,” CEO Shieak Tzeng, MD, a neurophysiologist who co-founded the company in 2019, said in the announcement.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.