fbpx

Nanomix Resuscitates Itself with a Heart Attack Test

Click for company website

In 2004, Harris and Harris Group made an investment of $2.25 million in Nanomix, a company developing sensors made from carbon nanotubes that it said could be used in environmental monitors, breathing tests, and other biological tests. When Nanomix announced a funding round of $16 million in 2005, David Macdonald, the company’s chief executive officer and president, said in a statement thatNanomix will spend the money raised in this round on selling these detectors. Nanomix will start selling some of the detectors this year“.

Just 5 years later, TINY made a statement in their 10-K that “during the third quarter of 2009, we received a payment of $4,115 from the sale of our interest in Nanomix, Inc.” These losses are actually worse than those incurred by investors who decided to buy and hold “over-the-counter nanotechnology companies” around 2004. Nanomix has managed to come back to life recently and here’s what they have to say about the “The Nanomix Story – A Legacy of Innovation”:

Nanōmix was founded in 2000 by UC Berkeley professors and award-winning physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Marvin L. Cohen and Alex Zettl.  The first phase of development delivered a proprietary, scalable carbon nanotube biosensor technology. In 2009, Nanōmix turned its focus to bringing the biosensor technology to the Point of Care invitro diagnostics market.

The company history fails to mention the $50 million Nanomix has already burned through between 2000 and 2009 which lost almost of its value if the Harris and Harris Group transaction is any indication. Fast forward to today and there is a new management team, however, the company’s original founders sit on the Board of Directors. The domain name www.nano.com has not changed and neither has the Nanomix logo, but they do have a new website. If you want to look at the old website from 2005, you can do so by clicking this link. Nanomix also has a new value proposition, the Nanomix mobile diagnostic platform which performs multiple in-vitro diagnostic assays simultaneously from a single blood sample. The Company’s primary use case for this handheld device is for emergency care workers to be able to test patients who are suspected of having a heart attack within ten minutes at the point of care.

Nanomix_POC_Test

Nanomix states they have sufficient financial resources at the moment for the initial product to launch in 2015 which will address a $1 billion-plus market.

At least 5 venture capitalists have burnt through $50 million in Nanomix so far, however, on January 30, 2014, the Company closed private financing for approximately $12 million received from a strategic corporate partner and existing investors. It remains to be seen if enough is different this time around for the Company to actually bring a product to market and then sell it.

Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.