Funding for handheld device that diagnoses asthma earlier

Investment into PulmoBioMed, a Northumbria University spin-out, was led by the North East Venture Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund and managed by Mercia Ventures, and included Northumbria University, SFC Capital and private investors in the USA, EU and UK. The company has also secured a £700,000 grant from Innovate UK to help it demonstrate the benefits of its technology.

PulmoBioMed said its breath sampling technology offers a fast, non-invasive way to obtain fluid samples from the deep lung without contamination from fluids from the mouth. Most sampling devices cannot distinguish between the two, so may result in an unclear or misleading diagnosis, while other methods are highly invasive and cannot be performed frequently, or suffer contamination from the environment.

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PulmoBioMed’s PBM-Hale device captures the breath as the patient exhales. It then separates large aerosol droplets which come from the mouth from fine droplets which come from the deep lung. Clinical studies have shown that it provided uncontaminated deep lung samples in two minutes that helped detect and quantify lung infections and inflammation in 100 per cent of symptomatic cases.