Finland: Brain diagnostics company raises €8 million

Investment

Nexstim Ltd of Helsinki, Finland, a medical device company developing a brain diagnostics and therapy, has completed a €8 million private placement. New investor HealthCap led the round, along with other new investors LSP (Life Sciences Partners) and Finnish Industry Investment Ltd. Sitra, an existing investor followed on.

The money will allow Nexstim to accelerate its international sales and marketing activities, and to expand its customer base from mainly research institutions to the market for clinical applications.

The financing will also enable the company to complete a clinical trial to gain marketing clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration.

Jukka-Pekka Särkkä, Managing Director of Nexstim, said, “It is gratifying to note that leading European life science venture capital funds recognise the value of financing global sales and marketing strategies which are so vital for realising the true potential of innovations in medical technology.”

Nexstim is pioneering navigated brain stimulation (NBS) for brain diagnostics and therapy. NBS combines transcranial magnetic stimulation with stereotactic navigation and ECG/EMG measurement. In NBS, a small coil held over the patient’s head delivers a series of short magnetic pulses that briefly activate minute areas of cortex, the upper layer of the brain.

EEG signals generated in the brain, or EMG signals from the patient’s limbs, are detected by high-resolution amplifiers, and a powerful computer analyses the data in real time. A standard MR image of the brain structure aligned to the contours of the patient’s head allows a technique called stereotactic navigation.

From the system monitor the operator sees the exact location of the magnetic pulses relative to the cortex and can thus freely, and precisely, guide the coil over the surface of the brain.

NBS systems have applications in functional brain imaging, including mapping motor and sensory areas of the cortex before neurosurgery, evaluating brain damage following stroke and testing spinal cord integrity.

Nexstim was founded in 2000 by Professor Risto Ilmoniemi to commercialise the combination of stereotacticly guided TMS and high-resolution EEG measurement. A spin-out company of Helsinki University of Technology, Nexstim has the rights to the broad intellectual property generated during eight years of scientific research, primarily at the BioMag laboratory of the Helsinki University Central Hospital.

The company has delivered over 30 systems to hospitals in Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and US.