Nobio, a company that develops bacteria-resistant materials for the medical devices and dental health markets, has raised $3.5 million. The financing round was led by the aMoon fund, managed by cofounder and managing partner Dr. Yair Schindel and anchor investor Marius Nacht, together with private investor. Dr. Ole Jensen, a cofounder of ClearChoice Holdings chain of US dental clinics, sold to Sun Capital Partners.
Nobio's lead product is a material for dental fillings that prevents infection in fillings. The company hopes to obtain marketing approval for this product in 2019. Later, Nobio hopes to include this material in a variety of medical devices.
Nobio was founded by Schindel and Prof. Ervin Weiss, Department of Prosthodontics at the Hadassah Ein Kerem medical center in Jerusalem. The CEO is former Given Imaging senior VP and former Aposense and EndoChoice CEO Yoram Ashery.
Ashery says, "Preventing bacterial infections is currently one of the most important needs in the medical devices field. Implanted devices such as catheters and dental implants and fillings are subject to infections. The only way of dealing with this right now is either through administering preventative antibiotics or by taking into account that infections will occur and administering antibiotics when they do."
Nobio's technology is a combination of bacteria-killing particles within the material that the medical device is made of. The active ingredients are known bacteria-killing materials from the cleaning industry that currently exist only in soluble forms. The company's technology is a method of integrating these active ingredients in solid core molecules using nanotechnology production technology. "Any bacteria landing on this material will encounter at least one or two deadly particles," Ashery says.
Schindel said, "Nobio's unique potential is to be an 'inside Intel' for a variety of common dental products and medical devices. The technology can attack locations of bacteria and prevent life-threatening infections both in hospitals and elsewhere. The current investment will enable the company to obtain its first regulatory approvals for its dental treatment products and to make progress in trials of a number of medical applications."
Nobio is starting with dental medicine. Asheray says, "The metal dental fillings we once used were usually resistant to bacterial infections, but for esthetic reasons and in order to avoid poisoning and environmental damage, they were replaced by white fillings. These are more likely to become infected and require repeat treatment or higher grade treatment. A white filling lasts for about five years. Our product is such a white filling, but it is resistant to bacterial.
Medicine uses known solid bacteria repellent materials, one of which is silver ions. Ashery says, "One of the disadvantages of silver is that when it kills bacteria, it releases ions from the silver. The release ends at some point, which means that we have to choose between delayed release, a sustained but weak effect, and or immediate release, which has a large effect, but for a short time." Nobio's product does not require release from within the material, and therefore has no expiry date.
The company plans to submit four filling compounds for approval in early 2019 and believes that it will obtain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to call its product anti-bacterial by the third quarter of 2019. The technology already passed initial clinical trials when the technology belonged to Hadassh Ein Kerem, even before the company was founded.
Nobio hopes to sign a marketing cooperation agreement with an existing company in the market in the next year. "Doctors like working with brands they know," Ashery says. He believes that the company will need one more financing round before achieving significant sales.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on August 5, 2018
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