IP commercialisation specialist Fusion IP (LON:FIP) announced that its 6.8 percent portfolio company Zilico has secured £1 million in investment funding.
Zilico has received £750,000 from the North West Fund for Biomedical, which is managed by SPARK Impact. Another £235,000 was raised from existing investors including Fusion.
The business, which was originally spun out from the University of Sheffield, has developed a technology to speed up and improve cervical cancer diagnosis.
“It is the strength of the Zilico proposition including the recent pivotal trial data that has enabled us to secure this significant investment,” said chief executive of Zilico Sameer Kothari.
“I am particularly pleased to bring on board SPARK Impact as an experienced healthcare investor.”
Cervical cancer affects around 500,000 women worldwide each year and is responsible for 300,000 deaths. Under existing screening practices in the UK, a woman will have a Pap smear or LBC test every three or five years and referred to a colposcopy clinic for examination if the test is positive.
The system being developed by Zilico has two applications to provide 'real time' results for women undergoing both these types of test, which shortens the time to diagnosis by several weeks.
The technology, which is called electrical impedance spectroscopy, can detect changes as cells progress from normal to precancerous and then to cancerous.
Zilico is currently disseminating the results of a European trial of the referral application of the system at “key meetings across the world”.