NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Cleveland HeartLab today announced it has completed its Series B financing round, raising $18.4 million.
Excel Venture Management and HealthCare Ventures led the round, which also included existing investors.
The funding will go toward accelerating adoption of its approach for evaluating cardiovascular disease risk by using biomarkers of inflammation. Cleveland HeartLab added that the financing will allow it to continue growing by "rapidly expanding" its menu of tests with new biomarkers in the pipeline and to "more aggressively" evaluate and in-license new biomarkers.
The lab's approach to cardiovascular risk assessment includes its CardioMPO test for circulating myeloperoxidase, which it called "the anchor of its proprietary inflammatory panel."
The panel, consisting of five biomarkers, "offers broader prognostic coverage than traditional blood tests," according to Cleveland HeartLab, "enabling physicians to determine if and to what degree their patients are at risk for cardiovascular disease."
The cardiovascular heart panel "allows physicians to better define those patients at risk for heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular events, as well as enabling them to determine where patients are on the spectrum of cardiovascular disease risk," Marc Penn, Cleveland HeartLab's chief medical officer and director of research at the Summa Cardiovascular Institute, said in a statement.
The company also said that it has plans to triple the footprint of its operations in Cleveland's Health-Tech corridor "to meet the growing demand for its current tests and to better support its new product development biomarker program."