Haemostatix, a drug development company based at Nottingham’s BioCity and originally a spin-out from Leicester University, has received £1.24m from investors Spark Ventures, Catapult and NESTA.
The investment will enable Haemostatix to continue to develop HaemoPlax, a synthetic platelet substitute designed to replace platelets currently obtained from blood donation.
Donor platelets, given by transfusion, assist in blood clotting and are currently used to treat cancer and surgical patients at risk from severe bleeding.
There is a real clinical need for a platelet substitute as donor platelets are expensive to produce, have a very short shelf life, and need to be screened to remove the risk of transmission of blood-borne viruses that cause Hepatitis and HIV.
Dr Jonathan Gee, investment director at Spark Ventures, commented that HaemoPlax had shown very promising results in preliminary pre-clinical trials and that the company was on track to take HaemoPlax into clinical trials.
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