A spin-out of a Louisville-based health care company has closed on a rather large fundraising seed round.
Nexosome Oncology raised $4 million in the round, which wrapped up at the end of 2021. The startup, led by CEO Todd Hembrough, is the third venture to spin out of NX PharmaGen Inc., a life sciences company, which also produced NX Prenatal and NX Development Corp.
Bob Saunders, co-founder and chairman of XLerateHealth and a board member of Nexosome Oncology, told me NX PharmaGen was set up with a portfolio of intellectual property to explore opportunities around the interrogation of exosomes, which are lipid proteins that contain genetic information like RNA. It licensed technology regarding using exosomes for information about cancer and prenatal conditions, specifically pre-term births, from McGill University in Canada and University of Louisville, respectively.
NX Prenatal, which has raised more than $10 million in venture capital, created three different diagnostics for early prediction of preterm birth. NX Development Corp. also raised $4 million and fostered the Food & Drug Administration approval and U.S. launch of a new imaging tool for brain tumor patients before it was acquired in 2018.
Nexosome Oncology, incorporated in 2021, is the final spinout of NX PharmaGen, Saunders said. It is focused on the applications of exosome-based diagnostics in the cancer field and will use the $4 million investment to test the predictive power of its technology against specific types of cancers.
"We're going to do some of the basic validation for a diagnostic test — I don't want to say what the early targets are," Saunders said. "This is a pan-oncology diagnostic modality for tumor-based cancers.
"All tumors shed exosomes, and exosomes contain proteomic and genetic information. We have intellectual property around the interrogation of proteins."
Kentucky Science & Technology Corp. (KSTC) was one of the investors in Nexosome Oncology's seed round, which also included a number of sophisticated angel investors, Saunders said.
