Belfast's Causeway Sensors raises £1.5m to help bring its biotech to market
Summary
The company said pharma firms need to screen millions of candidates and potential leads to create new biological drugs, and current instruments can only capture critical data after “protracted incubation periods”, which increases time and risk. “There is an unmet need for instrumentation that can provide high-value data in real time, online, throughout the drug development process, we believe Causeway Sensors can deliver on that need,” said Kernel Capital managing partner Niall Olden. Dr Antony Murphy, who has been promoted to the role of CEO, said the latest investment is the “final stepping stone on the path to commercialisation” of Causeway’s technology. “This investment, along with the competitive grant funding we were awarded from UKRI, will put Causeway in a strong position to fully validate our first product with blue-chip pharmaceutical companies before entering the bioproduction market,” Murphy said. The company is also part of the Northern Ireland technology consortium Smart Nano NI, which received £42.4m in funding last year to develop nanotechnology related to medical devices, communication and data storage.