A Houston-based medical device company plans to pursue its first human studies after an injection of financing.
In late April, Ictero Medical Inc. announced raising $6 million in Series A financing led by Connecticut-based MedTex Ventures, Austin-based S3 Ventures and an undisclosed strategic investor.
Ictero is developing a device for high-risk patients with gallbladder disease. The company has shown in animal models that the device is able to ablate the functions of the gallbladder with extreme cold cryotherapy. With the new funding and a partnership to scale manufacturing and quality testing, Ictero plans to perform its first human studies as soon as next year, said co-founder and CEO Matthew Nojoomi.
In addition to the new capital, Ictero also struck a partnership with Houston-based Biotex Inc., which specializes in medical product development, engineering, quality assurance and regulatory support, to accelerate the company's path towards commercialization. Partnering with BioTex also allows Ictero to keep its core team lean while utilizing Biotex's own engineering and development capabilities, Nojoomi said.
There are many regulatory hurdles for a medical device on the pathway to selling approved products, including Ictero's upcoming human trials. But the firm estimates it will be able to reach commercialization by around 2025.
Ictero is an early-stage company born out of the Texas Medical Center's Biodesign program in 2018.
Nojoomi, who has a background in biomedical engineering and design, had spend most of his time doing more traditional engineering work before deciding to come to Houston and join Biodesign, which sends post-grads in medicine, engineering, computer science, business and other fields into clinical settings to identify issues plaguing the health care sector.
"The Bay Area, Boston, Minnesota, Southern California are all very developed hubs," Nojoomi said. "But from my career angle, I think there was a lot of opportunity in Houston being that they were trying to get into the medical-device innovation game and they have the largest medical center here."
As Nojoomi evaluated clinical needs with commercial potential, treatments for gallbladder disease stood out to him. Other than surgery to remove the gallbladder — a minimally invasive laparoscopic cholecystectomy — there weren't a lot of different ways to treat patients with gallbladder disease.
However, many patients are unable to undergo such a surgical procedure, due to sickness, old age or other health circumstances. And other patients would probably forego having surgery, if they had the choice to do so, Nojoomi said.
From there, the concept for Ictero's cryoabalation device for treating gallbladders was born.
"[There was] a lot of literature that supported that gallbladder ablation had been tried before and was promising, but there wasn't any real device to accomplish it," Nojoomi said.
Ictero is also a portfolio company of the Texas Medical Center Venture Fund, which co-led Ictero's $1 million seed round with Houston-based Texas Halo Fund. Nojoomi previously spent time in Houston while receiving his undergraduate degree at Rice University.
