Dr. Josh Oppenheimer wants to arm hospitals with a tool to predict sudden cardiac arrest — and he just secured fresh funding to help make it happen.
The emergency medicine physician has led his medical device startup, Transformative, in closing its $1.7 million seed round. The raise, led by Estonia venture capital firm Tera Ventures, also had participation from Wellcome Trust and InHealth Ventures, plus other investors.
The capital will enable the business to seek clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for the product, which uses machine learning to analyze data from hospital room monitors to signal before the heart stops pumping blood to the rest of the body.
“It’s obvious to anyone who has cared for sudden cardiac arrest patients that immediate CPR and defibrillation offer the best opportunity for survival with good neurological function. Prevention of sudden cardiac arrest is even better,” said Oppenheimer, co-founder and CEO of Transformative, in an email. “I want to help healthcare providers around the world move from a reactive paradigm to a predictive paradigm and provide better care for our patients.”
Prior to this round, the company had raised about $300,000 in grants and $600,000 in equity investment. It’s now applying for more grant funding, and intends to hit its next commercial and regulatory milestones before raising a Series A round, Oppenheimer said.
That means running a validation study in partnership with George Washington University Hospital, where Oppenheimer recently completed his residency. And it involves meeting with regulators and patient monitoring companies, whose products could potentially integrate with Transformative’s technology, he said. “The result of these conversations will affect how quickly we apply for FDA clearance and bring our product to patients.”
The goal, he said, is to improve care for the 292,000 hospitalized patients who suffer from sudden cardiac arrest in the U.S. annually, and the 6 million around the world who die from it each year, per the American Heart Association. The tech has the potential to help tens of thousands more patients get defibrillation faster and, therefore, increase their chances to survive, Oppenheimer said.
The new financing also positions Transformative to look beyond commercialization, to start developing technologies that predict other serious medical events. But it’s too soon to narrow that focus.
“We also recognize that, in terms of sequencing, we need to succeed with our first product before we will be able to raise the funding needed to fully develop and commercialize additional products,” Oppenheimer said.
The eight-person team comprises four machine learning doctorate researchers who work with market research, regulatory and clinical research experts, as well as data scientists, on a contract basis. And they’re spread out between the U.S., U.K. and Estonia — putting off establishing a traditional D.C. headquarters while working remotely amid the coronavirus pandemic, Oppenheimer said.
The roster includes co-founders Marek Sirendi, who’s based in New York, and Marek Rei, who’s in London. Oppenheimer connected with them at Cambridge University in England, where he earned his MBA. They launched the business in 2016.
“We decided to tackle the problem of sudden cardiac arrest prediction because preliminary research studies had shown the potential promise of predictive sudden cardiac arrest algorithms, but no team had built and validated clinical-grade software,” he said. “Developing this technology is an incredibly challenging problem, but doing so could help millions of people, so we were all enthusiastic to try.”