D.C.’s Nanochon LLC is raising $3.5 million to make it through the final leg of its journey to bring a 3D-printed knee cartilage implant to market.
The company has already raised $1.8 million toward the round, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The company said it plans to use the funds to begin human trials and ultimately get Food and Drug Administration approval for its 3D-printed implant.
Nanochon has raised $5 million since its founding in 2016 to fund the clinical trials needed to bring its medical device to market.
The requirement of close to $10 million just to get to market might seem like a daunting task, but for Nanochon co-founder and CEO Ben Holmes it’s a small hurdle to be a billion-dollar asset.
“That FDA process goes from a liability to actually becoming an asset because you're actually building verifiable clinical data to show that what you're doing actually has efficacy and that's an extremely powerful marketing tool,” Holmes said.
Once human trials are complete and FDA approval is secured, Holmes wants to explore the path to acquisition traversed by med-tech companies like CartiHeal Inc.’s $500 million sale to Bioventus LLC in 2021 and Cartiva Inc.'s $435 million acquisition by Wright Medical Group NV in 2018.
“Exit early and often is the kind of guidance I've always gotten from successful entrepreneurs,” Holmes said.
Holmes chose to keep Nanochon in D.C. after the company spun out of his and co-founder Nathan Castro's time at George Washington University. Both worked in the university’s tissue engineering lab. They almost left the area to be in Johnson & Johnson's network of incubators, JLabs, in New York and Boston, but one was opened in D.C. and Nanochon was able to participate and stay local.
If it’s not hurting the company, Holmes said he plans to stay in the area and help the life sciences ecosystem grow. He’s increasingly hearing as he travels to life sciences conferences about "how hot the area is for life sciences," he said, and he thinks the buzz around the industry in Greater Washington will continue to grow.
“I have talked to people, especially from my old university or people that I met through the JLabs network, and people are starting to think about what other options could be out there other than just becoming an academic or going to work at the National Institutes of Health,” Holmes said. “I do think that there's a really great captive audience of talent and I think that's the real kind of potential of the D.C. area.”
Nanochon was one of the Washington Business Journal's Startups to Watch in 2021.
