Israeli MedTech startup NanoVation recently received a €2.5 million grant from the European Union as part of its Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator program. Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation program ever, and one of the most competitive. It supports Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) with
breakthrough innovation projects and aims to promote and fund discoveries and world-firsts by taking unique ideas from the lab to the market. The round of applications in October 2019 was highly competitive with a success rate of 4% from 1852 submitted proposals.
NanoVation develops SenseGuard that remotely monitors and measures lung function deterioration in patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), which is cited as the third leading world killer by WHO (World Health Organization) and other respiratory diseases. With an estimated over 328 million globally suffering from COPD, the costs for hospitalization alone in Europe and the U.S. combined hit somewhere in the $100 billion vicinity.
Dr. Gregory Shuster, CEO and co-founder of NanoVation, commented: “Lung function changes indicating a worsening condition can appear up to three weeks before reaching an acute state that often leads to hospitalization and a lengthy rehabilitation. The residual lung damage will impair quality of life, or in the worst-case lead to death.”
“Our pioneering device aims to enable identification of the early signs of deterioration in lung function, and enables early treatment," noted Shuster. "The cost of preventive intervention and treatment ranges from tens to hundreds of dollars, while they minimize unnecessary hospitalizations, which would cost between $10,000 and $40,000 for an individual in the US and between €3,000 and €10,000 in Europe, and translate into billions of dollars annually for the entire health system.”
The device itself offers a more modern solution, especially due to the ravaging Coronavirus pandemic, for monitoring patients with respiratory diseases at home or at the hospital. The SenseGuard product is wearable device based on the company's proprietary nano respiratory sensor technology, effectively measuring condition while alerting ahead of hospitalization for any decrease in lung function, allowing patients to have treatment adjusted at the comfort of their own home. With this yet again another MedTech innovation offering hospitals to better focus on COVID-19 containment by utilizing technology that prevents the need to come to the hospital.
Furthermore the device doesn't require invasive or otherwise uncomfortable tests to be executed on already suffering patients. The device has already gone through clinical trials and received CE marking. It is currently being deployed in hospitals in Israel and the EU for further clinical research of its capabilities.
The company was founded in 2014 as a spinoff from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and led by Dr. Gregory Shuster, CEO, Nadav Bachar, CTO, and Professor Hossam Haick, the company’s CSO. Up-to-date, the company raised $6 million in two rounds of financing and grant support from the EU Horizon 2020 program, as well as the Israel Innovation Authority. NanoVation intends on focusing the newly acquired grant towards further development and commercialization of the SenseGuard product.
Dr. Shuster added: “The Horizon 2020 Program grant is a strong vote of confidence in NanoVation and will help us dramatically reduce the clinical and economic burden of COPD and other respiratory diseases."
