Clarix Imaging, a startup company incubated at the University of Chicago, has scored $10 million from Swiss investment group Kineo Finance.
Founded in 2016, the medical technology firm has created a “state of the art,” point-of-care 3D imaging platform that allows radiologists and surgeons to assess surgical specimens in real time. Providing high-resolution images, along with visualization and analysis software, the system lets physicians easily assess if an initial breast resection completely removed the tumor target.
“The funding will be used for scaling up manufacturing and increasing access of our products to facilities using innovative business models such as [software as a service],” Clarix Imaging CEO Xiao Han, PhD, said in an Oct. 12 news item from the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration first cleared the Volumetric Specimen Imager in late 2019. However, the pandemic hampered the product’s roll-out, canceling in-person exhibits that are the lifeblood of launching such offerings. “COVID has had a huge impact on us,” Han said.
Clarix notes that the risk of re-excisions can be as high as 25% at some hospitals. It sees great potential for growth, with 300,000 patients diagnosed with breast cancer in the country each year. Han and colleagues previously completed a round of equity financing in 2022, and Clarix also has received $6.7 million in Small Business Innovation Research funding to date.
They’ve already sold a number of systems to hospitals and are finalizing a co-development partnership with a “major” academic hospital, according to the update.
“Clarix Imaging has demonstrated remarkable traction by addressing a fundamental unmet need in lumpectomies…We foresee tremendous expansion potential into novel use cases that were previously unimaginable,” Lee Hsieh, senior VP of Kineo Finance, said in a separate 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.