VenoStent has raised additional funding. Image courtesy of VenoStent

A clinical-stage Houston health tech company with a novel therapeutic device has raised venture capital funding and secured a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

VenoStent Inc., which is currently in clinical trials with its bioabsorbable perivascular wrap, announced the closing of a $20 million series A round co-led by Good Growth Capital and IAG Capital Partners. The two Charleston, South Carolina-based firms also led VenoStent's 2023 series A round that closed last year at $16 million.

Additionally, the company secured a $3.6 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Grant from NIH, which will help fund its multi-center, 200-patient, randomized controlled trial in the United States.

Tim Boire, VenoStent CEO and co-founder, describes 2024 so far as "a momentous year" so far for his company.

"In the span of a few months, we initiated our first clinical sites, enrolled the first patients in our large RCT and closed our Series A with Norwest," Boire says in a news release. "We also received the NIH grant, which enables us to execute our trial with the highest degree of quality and rigor to make it as scientifically robust and impactful to patients as possible.

'Each of these are major company milestones that collectively represent many years of intensive and fruitful R&D and collaboration," he continues. "These recent milestones will propel our company forward to an exciting next phase."

Tim Boire is the CEO and co-founder of VenoStent. Photo via LinkedIn

The company's innovation, the SelfWrap, goes around arteriovenous (AV) access sites at the time of AV fistula creation surgery. The device is intended "to accelerate the usability and increase the durability of the fistula sites for chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients requiring hemodialysis," reads the release, "mimicking the arterial environment in veins, which experience a 10x increase in pressure and flow during AV creation and causes the veins to become unusable in dialysis."

Along with the investment, VenoStent announced two new board observers. Norwest General Partner Dr. Zack Scott and Investor Dr. Ehi Akhirome are bringing their expertise to the growing company.

"Norwest's investment is tremendous validation for VenoStent, and we are thrilled to have both Zack and Ehi joining the company's board," VenoStent COO and Co-Founder Geoffrey Lucks adds in the release. "Zack and Ehi have extensive knowledge in our space, and their added value will match the capital and cache of Norwest dollar-for-dollar."

Last year at the same time VenoStent announced its last funding round, the SelfWrap was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin its U.S. Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) study.

"Over half a million people in the U.S. rely on hemodialysis to survive and require an arteriovenous fistula creation surgery in order to receive the treatment. However, the AV fistula procedure has a one-year failure rate of more than 60 percent, which significantly impacts patients' survival rates and quality of life," Scott says in the release. "VenoStent's groundbreaking technology for AV fistula formation, SelfWrap, has the potential to significantly improve these odds. We look forward to working with the VenoStent team as it proves the efficacy of this breakthrough technology in order to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of CKD patients."

Last summer, Boire told InnovationMap on the Houston Innovators Podcast that he's looking to launch the product in 2026.

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Houston team develops low-cost device to treat infants with life-threatening birth defect

infant innovation

A team of engineers and pediatric surgeons led by Rice University’s Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies has developed a cost-effective treatment for infants born with gastroschisis, a congenital condition in which intestines and other organs are developed outside of the body.

The condition can be life-threatening in economically disadvantaged regions without access to equipment.

The Rice-developed device, known as SimpleSilo, is “simple, low-cost and locally manufacturable,” according to the university. It consists of a saline bag, oxygen tubing and a commercially available heat sealer, while mimicking the function of commercial silo bags, which are used in high-income countries to protect exposed organs and gently return them into the abdominal cavity gradually.

Generally, a single-use bag can cost between $200 and $300. The alternatives that exist lack structure and require surgical sewing. This is where the SimpleSilo comes in.

“We focused on keeping the design as simple and functional as possible, while still being affordable,” Vanshika Jhonsa said in a news release. “Our hope is that health care providers around the world can adapt the SimpleSilo to their local supplies and specific needs.”

The study was published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, and Jhonsa, its first author, also won the 2023 American Pediatric Surgical Association Innovation Award for the project. She is a recent Rice alumna and is currently a medical student at UTHealth Houston.

Bindi Naik-Mathuria, a pediatric surgeon at UTMB Health, served as the corresponding author of the study. Rice undergraduates Shreya Jindal and Shriya Shah, along with Mary Seifu Tirfie, a current Rice360 Global Health Fellow, also worked on the project.

In laboratory tests, the device demonstrated a fluid leakage rate of just 0.02 milliliters per hour, which is comparable to commercial silo bags, and it withstood repeated disinfection while maintaining its structure. In a simulated in vitro test using cow intestines and a mock abdominal wall, SimpleSilo achieved a 50 percent reduction of the intestines into the simulated cavity over three days, also matching the performance of commercial silo bags. The team plans to conduct a formal clinical trial in East Africa.

“Gastroschisis has one of the biggest survival gaps from high-resource settings to low-resource settings, but it doesn’t have to be this way,” Meaghan Bond, lecturer and senior design engineer at Rice360, added in the news release. “We believe the SimpleSilo can help close the survival gap by making treatment accessible and affordable, even in resource-limited settings.”

Oxy's $1.3B Texas carbon capture facility on track to​ launch this year

gearing up

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum is gearing up to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere at its $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area.

Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said during the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call that the Stratos project — being developed by carbon capture and sequestration subsidiary 1PointFive — is on track to begin capturing CO2 later this year.

“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos.

Carbon dioxide captured by Stratos will be stored underground or be used for enhanced oil recovery.

Oxy says Stratos is the world’s largest DAC facility. It’s designed to pull 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air and either store it underground or use it for enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery extracts oil from unproductive reservoirs.

Most of the carbon credits that’ll be generated by Stratos through 2030 have already been sold to organizations such as Airbus, AT&T, All Nippon Airways, Amazon, the Houston Astros, the Houston Texans, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and TD Bank.

The infrastructure business of investment manager BlackRock has pumped $550 million into Stratos through a joint venture with 1PointFive.

As it gears up to kick off operations at Stratos, Occidental is also in talks with XRG, the energy investment arm of the United Arab Emirates-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., to form a joint venture for the development of a DAC facility in South Texas. Occidental has been awarded up to $650 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the South Texas DAC hub.

The South Texas project, to be located on the storied King Ranch, will be close to industrial facilities and energy infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Initially, the roughly 165-square-mile site is expected to capture 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, with the potential to store up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year.

“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” Hollub said.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.