Sphere Medical to bring manufacturing to Wales

Arthurian Life Sciences, led by Sir Chris Evans, has led a £13.2m fundraiser for  Sphere Medical, a Cambridge–based medical device company, on the condition that it moves manufacturing to Wales.

Sphere Medical’s lead product, Proxima, addresses the unmet market need for frequent blood gas measurements for clinically unstable patients. The global market potential of Proxima when sold worldwide is in excess of US$200 million per annum.  

This is the latest deal for the Wales Life Sciences Investment Fund, which is managed by Arthurian. Other specialist investors, notably Woodford Patient Capital Trust, have followed Arthurian’s lead and will be investing, as are a number of the existing and new institutional shareholders.  

The addition of two new, highly regarded investors in life sciences to the Sphere Medical’s shareholder register is transformational and the fundraise sets the company up to commercially exploit the current generation of Proxima and bring future generations, currently in development, to market.  

“Wales is a world leader in life sciences and advanced manufacturing. High growth companies are increasingly attracted to scaling up here in an environment where the required skills, resource and financial support are available in abundance. We see this from UK and US companies looking to set up shop in Wales to target the European market, or European companies looking for the talent and resource to expand into the next phase of growth.”  

The fundraise is the latest in a number of significant advances made by Sphere Medical.  

New CEO Dr Wolfgang Rencken joined in March 2014 and has delivered a number of commercial and operational milestones, including CE marking of Proxima 3, its launch and a successful post-market clinical follow-up study.

Dr David Martyr and Meinhard Schmidt were recently appointed to the Board as Non-Executive Directors. Dr Martyr is CEO of Tecan Group AG, a CHF1.5bn Swiss-based leading global provider of laboratory instruments and solutions in biopharmaceuticals, forensics and clinical diagnostics and Mr Schmidt, a senior executive in the healthcare, diagnostics and medical devices industries and previously senior executive at Roche Diagnostics.  Both are highly experienced professionals with significant experience in commercialising medical devices as well as strong track records in business development and M&A.

Commenting on the attraction to Woodford and other investors, Sir Chris said: “This is a great company with a great piece of technology. All the product development risk is gone. There is a new exciting management team delivering. The interest already seen from the market and development partner Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics validates the potential demand for the product in what is up to a £200m market opportunity. Now is the time to invest.”