|
MassDevelopment In The News
Worcester Biotech Gets $800,000 for Equipment, Growth
April 20, 2007: Mass High Tech, by Ryan McBride
Any amount of cash shy of $10 million - never mind $800,000 - may sound like chump change compared with the multibillion-dollar deals that make business headlines on a regular basis.
But for a Worcester-based 14-person startup that has yet to commercialize a product, $800,000 provides the money needed to jump-start its manufacturing operations.
The board of MassDevelopment, the finance and development authority for the Bay State, voted unanimously last week to award ECI Biotech Inc. an $800,000, low-interest loan from its Emerging Technology Fund so the company can purchase equipment it needs to manufacture its protein-based diagnostic system to detect infections in wounds.
"As soon as we get approval for the loan, we can start building the pilot manufacturing facility," said Mitchell Sanders, founder and CTO of ECI, which he said changed its name from Expressive Constructs Inc. earlier this year.
Sanders estimated that it would take four to five weeks before his firm and MassDevelopment agree on terms of the financing.
The loan is part of ECI's $3.8 million plan to retrofit its offices at 85 Prescott St. in Worcester to accommodate development and manufacturing of its wound diagnostics, Sanders said.
The company last month also closed a $2 million equity financing and received a National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research grant of $208,311 to develop the product.
Meanwhile, Sanders said the company is working to finalize what he described as a "multimillion-dollar" agreement by this summer with an unnamed corporate partner for development of the wound-infection test in its quest to grab a share of a more than $1 billion market for advanced wound care in the United States.
The diagnostic is the size of a home-pregnancy test and is designed to detect common causes of wound infections, such as staph or strep bacteria, said Sanders, who conducted postdoctoral studies in bacteria at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
The test would be given to patients at their bedside and yield results within 10 minutes - much faster than the days it now takes for such data to come from outside laboratories, he said.
Plans are to begin clinical trials of the product within the next six to eight months, with an initial product release in about two years. Sanders said he also plans to hire six to 10 people this year to work in manufacturing.
The device is an evolution of the company's initial product, designed to detect bacteria levels in poultry before it emits the typical foul smell that indicates that meat has gone bad.
The device, which looks like a strip of paper, would be placed in the packaging of the meat.
Lexington's Food Quality Sensor International Inc. makes a comparable freshness detector for consumers called SensorfreshQ.
Sanders said his firm's technology, however, has received a cool reception from poultry executives.
© Copyright 2007 Mass High Tech.
|
|
