Magnolia Medical raises $7m to support Steripath system

Magnolia Medical Technologies said today it raised $7.3 million in a new round of funding to support its Steripath blood collection system.

The SteriPath vacuum-assisted blood collection system is designed to divert and sequester contaminants from the initial blood sample specimen to eliminate “false positive” blood culture test results from patients with suspected sepsis, the Seattle-based company said.

“Especially in the emergency department environment, hospitals face many challenges to obtain non-contaminated blood culture samples from patients with suspected sepsis. Our hospital had already undertaken a wide range of efforts to reduce contamination. But our patient population and clinical workflow realities made it very challenging to obtain culture samples aseptically. SteriPath changed all of that — and quickly reduced our false positive rate by greater than 90% from over 5% to under 0.5%,” Dr. Andrew Sama said in a prepared release.

The funding round was joined by several institutional investors, including the Canepa Advanced Healthcare Fund, Magnolia said. In conjunction with the funding round, Canepa managing director Dr. Paul Enever has joined the company’s board.

“We are proud to support the valuable contribution to better medical care represented by SteriPath, which addresses a widely recognized, unmet need for better blood collection technology. The combination of the clinical as well as economic value created by SteriPath is a win for patients, hospitals and public health alike,” Dr. Enever said in a press release.

Funds will help support accelerated commercialization of the SteriPath, as well as supporting the company’s R&D pipeline.

“Our clinical trial results have consistently demonstrated 10x better performance with SteriPath compared to the current standard of care. The impact we’ve had at major medical institutions demonstrates that our technology improves patient care, reduces inappropriate utilization of powerful antibiotics and helps hospitals realize substantial net savings. Blood culture contamination is a measureable, tangible problem that hospitals can now fix using our SteriPath system,” co-founder & CEO Greg Bullington said in a prepared statement.

Last July, Magnolia Medical said it raised $13.8 million in a Series B round of financing to support the commercialization of its SteriPath blood collection system.

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