Forbion Capital Partners, the Dutch life sciences venture capital firm, today announces that it has led the expansion financing of the Series A round of Curetis AG together with Roche Venture Fund, CD-Venture and management. Curetis has developed a diagnostics platform to identify the pathogen that causes a patient's pneumonia and which antibiotic resistance patterns are present within a few hours. It will allow physicians to diagnose the cause of the infection faster and commence the appropriate targeted antibiotic regimen immediately in critically ill patients. The platform is very robust and versatile and can be used for other molecular diagnostics applications as well.
Since its inception in 2007, Curetis AG has developed the Unyvero™ instrument platform handling disease specific disposable cartridges for the analysis of various marker panels, covering both pathogens and antibiotic resistance genes. The work flow of the Unyvero™ platform is fully automated, practical to use and enables testing at the point of need, eliminating operator-induced variations and ensures high-quality results in a short time frame. The first application for pneumonia testing has successfully finalized extensive preclinical testing and is about to enter into pivotal clinical trials with the aim of entering the European market as a CE-marked device in 2012.
Holger Reithinger, Partner at Forbion Capital Partners, said: “There is an urgent unmet medical need for faster identification of pathogens and resistance markers due to increasing antibiotic resistance and even multidrug resistance. With pneumonia, most current diagnostics are still relying on culture-based technologies, which can take days to deliver results. Curetis' technology platform will reduce this timeline to hours. The company is led by an experienced diagnostics industry management team, which has built the company from the start. I am looking forward to helping to make this a commercial success." Holger Reithinger has joined Curetis' Board of Directors.
Oliver Schacht, CEO of Curetis added: "We are pleased to have Forbion leading our expanded series A financing and Roche Venture Fund joining as a new investor. These two investors will bring additional molecular diagnostics expertise to the table and will significantly strengthen our investor syndicate for the upcoming corporate development phases. I am also delighted that CD-Venture increased their commitment to Curetis and have taken the opportunity myself to invest at this exciting stage of Curetis’ development. We are now well funded for the upcoming clinical trials as well as our planned 2012 European market launch of the Unyvero platform and pneumonia application."
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