Jun 20 2008
JumpStart Inc., the Northeast Ohio venture development organization that accelerates the growth of innovative early-stage businesses and ideas, has announced an investment commitment of $350,000 in Cleveland-based Tursiop Technologies, LLC. The JumpStart investment is part of a recently closed investment round that included $1 million from RMS Management of Cleveland, OH.
Tursiop is developing a novel nanomaterial-based coil for magnetic resonance scanners. This new type of coil will bring fundamental change to the MRI market through its improved image quality, compared to conventional coil technologies. Targeting a projected billion dollar market by 2012, Tursiop has already built, tested, and generated images with several prototype coils. These coils have outperformed conventional coils and the Tursiop team, including CEO Brad Goldstein, believes that with additional development further significant gains will be achieved.
“Our patent-pending technology is based on a fundamental change in the way the coils are designed and manufactured,” said Goldstein. “We at Tursiop are excited to be at the nexus of medical imaging and nanotechnology and look forward to providing clinicians the means to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of some of the major health concerns of our time, including heart disease, neurological disorders, and cancer.”
JumpStart Entrepreneur-in-Residence Kevin Mendelsohn will be working with the company. “MRI scanners and coils are mature technologies that have experienced only incremental change over the past 10 to 15 years,” Mendelsohn said. “Currently, the most effective method of improving image quality is through increased magnet strength, which is a costly alternative. The other is through the use of specialty coils, but when compared to increased magnet strength, the improvement has been relatively small. Tursiop’s coils offer improved imaging performance comparable to that of a more powerful scanner, but at a much lower cost,” he concluded.
With the close of this investment round, Tursiop plans to establish office and laboratory spaces, continue research and product development, and begin the FDA approval process.
This is JumpStart’s 41st investment in its 30th company. Other healthcare companies in JumpStart’s portfolio include AcelleRX Therapeutics, AnalizaDx, CardioInsight Technologies, CerviLenz, Great Lakes Pharmaceuticals, Synapse Biomedical and Telerad Express.