UCL start-up announces investment and new CEO

Endomagnetics Ltd, a business that began life as a research project at UCL, has raised £770,000 from a syndicate led by UCL Business plc, UCL's knowledge transfer and technology commercialisation company, and Sussex Place Ventures. The financing coincides with the appointment of Dr Eric Mayes as CEO of the company, and builds upon a previous seed round of investment together with support from the Technology Strategy Board. Endomagnetics Ltd is a medical devices company that was spun out from UCL to capitalise upon research work in the area of magnetic sensing led by Professor Quentin Pankhurst, Director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. Through the use of magnetic tracers and a highly sensitive magnetic sensing device, Endomagnetics is able to help breast cancer surgeons detect whether breast cancer has spread to other parts of the body. Globally this is vitally important, with around 1.25 million new cases of breast cancer being diagnosed each year, and the rate increasing by nearly 20,000 cases year on year. In practically all of these cases, surgery is required to remove the tumour. The accepted best practice is to concurrently excise both the tumour and the 'sentinel' lymph nodes to ascertain whether cancer has spread from the tumour to other sites in the body.