Oxford’s OrganOx raises a £25 million profusion to expand its commercial footprint and make transplant organs more widely available

Oxford-based medtech firm OrganOx has raised £25 million in growth investment as it looks to expand its commercial footprint. The company was founded in Oxford, as a spin out of the university, in 2008 – it says this growth funding is a step in the direction of getting its ducks in a row for an IPO.

The firm develops technology increases the number of organs available for transplantation, by creating an environment which mimics that of a human body. The fresh funding will allow it to ‘build new manufacturing facilities, and conduct a broad array of post-market clinical evaluations’. The funding round was led by Lauxera Capital Partners. 

“Although more than 9,000 liver transplants are performed each year in the United States, more than 1,500 people die each year waiting for a liver on the transplant list. This represents only ~3% of the 50,000 Americans who die each year from liver failure. This is unacceptable. Lauxera is proud and honoured to back the OrganOx team and its global commercial scale up," says Samuel Levy, Founding Partner of Lauxera Capital Partners. 

In OrganOx's machine, 'livers are continuously perfused at physiological pressures using oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The core technology employed by metra has been in development for over 15 years and the device is FDA approved for liver preservation. The company’s technology for kidney transplantation is in human clinical trials'.

"Organ transplantation saves and radically improves lives. Approximately 100,000 men, women and children in the United States are on the national transplant waiting list with a new patient added every ten minutes. OrganOx is committed to using our Normothermic Machine Perfusion technology to make organs more widely available to patients who need them around the world. We are thrilled at the prospect of working closely with Lauxera to take OrganOx to new heights in the US and ROW," says Craig Marshall, CEO of OrganOx. 

"This investment from Lauxera represents a diversification of the company’s cap table and is an important step in the direction of getting ready for a potential future IPO," adds Oern Stuge, Executive Chairman of OrganOx. 

Main image: OrganOx metra (Source: organox.com)