Celdara Medical, LLC today announced that the first DRIVEN Accelerator Hub Participant Company, CairnSurgical, Inc., has closed a Series A investment led by Morningside Group.
The CairnSurgical team first engaged with both the DRIVEN External Advisory Committee (representing over $10B in assets under management and over $700B in cumulative market cap), and the DRIVEN Internal Advisory Committee (representing each of the leading research institutions in the region) at the inaugural DRIVEN meeting in January 2019.
Jake Reder, PhD, Celdara’s CEO and Principal Investigator of the DRIVEN Hub, stated, “I am gratified to see the CairnSurgical team achieve this key milestone, and even better to do so with such a forward-thinking investment firm. Their outstanding team and excellent clinical data have already demonstrated the potential to improve breast cancer surgical outcomes and patient lives. This investment further accelerates their growth and impact. We’re all very proud of CairnSurgical’s successes! More broadly, this is an excellent example of the power in connecting local innovation with sophisticated global capital.”
CairnSurgical was spun out of Dartmouth College and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Cofounded by Richard Barth, MD, Prof. of Surgery, Venkat Krishnaswamy, PhD, Assistant Prof. of Engineering, and Keith Paulsen, PhD, Prof. of Engineering, Radiology, and Surgery, and led by CEO David Danielsen, CairnSurgical is a pre-revenue, clinical-stage company developing patient-specific technologies to improve surgical outcomes. “The DRIVEN Partnership Program has been invaluable to us as a young company navigating financing and strategy decisions,” said David Danielsen. CairnSurgical’s first product is a breast cancer surgery guide, the Breast Cancer Locator (BCL). Currently, 20-25% of breast conserving surgeries fail to achieve clear tumor margins, requiring patients to undergo re-excision surgery, which is associated with difficult recovery, increased morbidity, and increased emotional strain for patients. The cost of positive margins to the US healthcare system is over $500M per year. CairnSurgical’s BCL enables precise tumor localization and excision, and has been tested in both single arm and randomized clinical trials. Prior to investment from Morningside Group, CairnSurgical was financed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the New Hampshire Innovation Research Center (NHIRC) and private investments.