Arab Israeli startup developing stroke treatment raises $7m
News source:
founded by an Arab Israeli couple that is pioneering a treatment for hemorrhagic stroke, announced on Monday that they have raised $7 million in funding. The company, founded by Prof. Abd al-Roof Higazi and his wife Dr. Noha Higazi, is developing a treatment for strokes that cause bleeding in the brain.
“We had the idea while working with a certain protein that is usually used to open blood clots and blood vessels that had been occluded,” explained Prof. Higazi, who heads the laboratories and department of Clinical Biochemistry at the Hadassah University Medical Center Hospital in Jerusalem.
While some strokes are caused by blood clots, and medicines exist to reopen the flow of blood, other strokes are characterized by bleeding in the brain, he explained. The protein in question, tPA, is naturally produced, and works to prevent blood clots from fully forming.
While that’s usually good news, it can prevent the body from healing bleeding in the brain.
“It’s over-secreted when there’s damage in the brain. We inject an antidote that competes with the tPA protein and inhibit its activity,” he said. In other words, they trick the body into thinking there’s already plenty of tPA, but the medication itself doesn’t stop clot formation. It also doesn’t initiate new clots, which would be a risk factor in causing other strokes, he added.
Monday’s funding announcement is a big success for the company, which has completed the incubation program at NGT. NGT, which is partly funded by the Economy Ministry, is a Nazareth- based incubator that seeks to develop start-ups in the Arab sector. “It’s not trivial for a pharma company in the incubation stage raise such a sum of money,” noted Dr. Amos Ofer, the company’s CEO. Read More >>