Ireland’s Luminate Medical shines with $5 million to bring chemo hair loss device

Irish medical device company Luminate Medical has raised over $5 million in grant financing and a seed round investment to develop medical devices to eliminate the side effects of cancer treatment such as chemotherapy-induced hair loss.

The company is currently developing its flagship product, Lily, a portable head-covering device that prevents the delivery of chemotherapy drugs to the hair follicles in a comfortable and repeatable way.

While the current devices to prevent hair loss use scalp cooling therapy, which requires patients to remain in the clinic for hours after treatment under extremely cold temperatures, the Lily enables patients to purchase and access hair loss treatment directly and will eliminate the requirement for patients to remain in the clinic after chemotherapy treatment.

So, what’s next in the Y Combinator S21 company’s roadmap? The funding, which saw the participation of Elkstone Capital, SciFounders, and Lisbon-based Faber, will be used to complete patient clinical trials of Lily in Europe and the U.S. in 2022 and 2023, alongside expanding its R&D team. Clinical trial sites for the product include the company’s home in Galway. Based on this clinical data, the company will engage with the FDA for product clearance in 2023.

“Our mission is to revolutionise the user experience of healthcare. We do that by building medical devices with a patient-first approach and focusing on the needs that truly matter to patients. This funding round will allow us to complete first-in-patient clinical trials of our innovative Lily Device and accelerate our path to market launch and patient impact in 2024,” said Barbara Oliveira, CTO and co-founder of Luminate Medical.

Commenting on the fundraise, Sofia Santos, partner at Faber said: “The use of data to solve a problem has been ignored by the traditional medical device industry. Improving cancer patients’ quality of life and care along their treatment journey is an underestimated field where advanced technological development can add a lot of value.”