Frontier IP portfolio company Cambridge Raman Imaging (“CRI” or the “Company”) has:
- received a €400,000 European Innovation Council (“EIC”) Transition grant to support scale up of its groundbreaking Raman imaging technology and artificial intelligence for use in medicine, environmental analysis, biology and other applications;
- signed a distribution agreement with Hooke Instruments Limited (“Hooke Instruments” or the “Distributor”) to enter the Chinese market for medical and scientific research microscopes; and
- announced it is to target industrial quality control in the pharmaceutical sector as an initial strategic focus.
The non-dilutive EIC funding, provided by the European Union, is to be used to back the Company’s move to develop its high-speed multimodal Raman imaging for use in a wide range of applications, from detecting cancerous tumours in human cells and tissue to microplastics in the environment.
Frontier IP holds a 26.81 per cent equity stake in the Company.
CRI’s technology analyses multiple Raman spectra at once to create a complete chemical picture of a compound in near real time, and is much faster than other Raman systems, which analyse one spectrum at a time or chemical processes.
The Company has decided to extend its focus to develop the technology for pharmaceutical companies to use in their mass production lines to analyse the chemical composition of the tablets, pills and powders they make to ensure they contain the right amounts of active ingredients.
While CRI remains committed to the medical markets, industrial quality control provides the Company with an opportunity to scale at a faster pace because the regulatory barriers to entry are much lower.
The global market for pharmaceutical inspection equipment is currently valued at $5 billion and is forecast to grow to $13 billion by 2033*. New regulations, such as Real-time Release Testing and Quality by Design, are expected to drive demand for CRI’s system. The Company is in discussions with two leading pharmaceutical groups to begin pilot testing of the company’s industrial quality control machine.
Hooke Instruments is a specialist manufacturing and distributor of scientific and medical instruments based in China. The Distributor has more than 100 customers globally, including life sciences researchers, laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. It is to sell CRI’s technology to the Chinese market only.
*
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pharmaceutical-inspection-equipment-market-analysis-t6kwc
Francesco Crisafi, Cambridge Raman Imaging’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, said:
We are delighted to win the EIC grant, which provides further validation of our technology and the wide range of applications to which it can be put to use. While we are initially targeting the industrial quality control markets, we are still very much at work in developing our technology for the medical and other markets.
Neil Crabb, Chief Executive Officer of Frontier IP Group, said:
Cambridge Raman Imaging is already building a solid sales pipeline in the medical and biological research markets, in particular. However, industrial quality control provides the Company with the best opportunity to scale at speed. We are encouraged that discussions are already underway with companies in the pharmaceutical sector.