A St. Paul med-tech startup has secured a
$1 million bridge loan to keep it going until it can finish its next round of fundraising.
NxThera is developing a minimally invasive
ablation procedure for treating enlarged prostate and prostate cancer. Unlike existing ablation treatments, NxThera's device uses vapor rather than radio-frequency or microwave energy.
"The best way to describe it is that we're using vapor to kill tissue," says Bob Paulson, a former Medtronic executive who now NxThera's chief executive.
Paulson says the procedure takes less than two minutes, compared to the 30 minutes or more needed for ablation treatments using radio frequency or microwaves instead of vapor.
"As it phase-shifts from vapor to liquid, it releases stored thermal energy and kills the tissue, but kind of does it gently," says Paulson. It's faster and less painful, and leads to fewer complications, he says.
The company is still proving out those results. It started its first human patient study earlier this year in Chile, and the results have been "extremely favorable" so far, according to Paulson.
NxThera was founded in March 2008 by Michael Hoey, a former physiology professor at the University of Minnesota, along with patent attorney John Shadduck.
The company is currently finalizing its product design and working on completing its next round of fundraising, which will pay for a full-scale U.S. clinical study.
"As you may have heard, it's kind of a tough market to raise money these days," says Paulson. "We haven't slowed down any of our development. It's taking longer to get the dollars to finalize the financing, but we'll get there."
Source: Bob Paulson, NxThera
Writer:
Dan Haugen