EN
Aachen, Germany, April 30th, 2024 – Aachen-based Organ Vitality Tech company Vivalyx GmbH has received an investment of 5.4 million euros led by TechVision Fonds (TVF) and Brightlands Venture Partners (BVP) in an oversubscribed seed financing round. The team led by Dr. Andreas Schumacher and Dr. Benedict Doorschodt is developing novel solutions to increase organ vitality with the aim to expand the number of organs available for life-saving transplantations. The capital raised will bethe necessary clinical trials to achieve regulatory clearance and to start commercialization.
"The financing round brings us a decisive step closer to bringing our products to market. We see great potential in our innovations to revolutionize the organ transplantation industry worldwide. We are pleased to have found investors who share our vision and back our mission," says Dr. Andreas Schumacher, CEO of Vivalyx.
Donor organ shortage remains a critical unmet medical need
Patients and medical doctors are awaiting innovations in the field of organ transplantation. The statistics underpin the need for s used to finance uch innovations. The average waiting time for a donor kidney is up to eight years, and over a million patients worldwide are currently awaiting a donor organ.
This shortage in donor organs is solvable by perfusing organs at body temperature: a method clinically proven but hardly scalable due to reliance on rare donor blood and its high costs.
Vivalyx introduces a patented solution surpassing this barrier for the first time, making perfusion at body temperature scalable. Their novel liquid Vivalyx Omnisol outperforms the efficacy of the blood-based benchmark in preclinical trials, is fully synthetic – eliminating blood-related concerns – and significantly cuts costs. Vivalyx Omnisol does not only work for perfusion at body-temperature, but is meant for all methods, cold and warm perfusion and static cold storage, with expected beneficial clinical outcomes. Thus, Vivalyx Omnisol will be the process- and cost-effective one stop solution for all preservation applications.
Dr. Luc Starmans from Brightlands Venture Partners: “The shortage of donor organs is a huge challenge for healthcare systems worldwide. Vivalyx is developing innovations that have the potential to significantly increase the number of available donor organs.”
Renowned international investors and business angels invest in experienced founding team
Dr. Andreas Schumacher and Dr. Benedict Doorschodt founded Vivalyx 2022 together with co-founders Prof. Dr. René Tolba, Dr. Christian Bleilevens, Prof. Dr. Malte Brettel and Marius Rosenberg. The product idea is based on decades of research by Doorschodt, Tolba and Bleilevens. Overall, the team combines entrepreneurial experience with deep organ transplantation knowledge. In addition to the lead investors, the experienced founding team managed to attract other industry experts such as Arve Capital, the US deeptech VC Goose Capital and other well-known business angels such as Springboard Health Angels, Andrej Henkler and Thomas Ebeling, former CEO of Novartis Pharma.
"We look forward to supporting the dedicated team and the outstanding technology together with this great investor consortium in the coming years," says Bernhard Kugel, Managing Director of TVF.