Lauxera Capital leads £25m investment into OrganOx

Lauxera Capital Partners has led a £25 million growth investment into OrganOx, a commercial-stage, Oxford, England-based medical device company. OrganOx develops and commercialises organ preservation and transportation devices designed to directly save lives by increasing the supply of organs available for transplantation.

OrganOx was founded in 2008 by two renowned Oxford University Professors, Peter Friend (professor of surgery) and Constantin Coussios (professor of biomedical engineering), as an academic spinoff from Oxford University. OrganOx’s device, metra, preserves donor livers and enables assessment of the organs prior to transplantation reducing organ discard and allowing surgeons to perform transplantations during the working day rather than as an emergency at night.

OrganOx’s mission is to increase the number of organs available for transplantation. Its metra device seeks to re-create an environment for the recovered liver that mimics the human body. In the machine, livers are continuously perfused at physiological pressures using oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The core technology employed by metra has been in development for over 15 years and the device is FDA approved for liver preservation. The company’s technology for kidney transplantation is in human clinical trials.

metra’s rapid growth has been driven by the technology’s ability to objectively assess a donor organ allowing surgeons to confidently transplant “marginal” livers that might otherwise have been discarded. Donor liver preservation and assessment with the metra has resulted in over 50% fewer liver discards and 20% more transplanted livers, compared with static cold storage, according to a recent, randomised European trial.

Utilisation of machine perfusion prior to liver transplantation makes the surgery safer by reducing the risk of recipient hypotension and cardiac arrest on the operating table. As metra offers up to 24 hours of preservation time, NMP also enables surgeons to avoid operating overnight. Avoiding night operations reduces surgical complications and makes a career in transplant surgery more sustainable. Lauxera’s investment will enable OrganOx to radically expand its commercial footprint, build new manufacturing facilities, and conduct a broad array of post-market clinical evaluations.

Craig Marshall, CEO of OrganOx, said: "Organ transplantation saves and radically improves lives. Approximately 100,000 men, women and children in the United States are on the national transplant waiting list with a new patient added every ten minutes. OrganOx is committed to using our Normothermic Machine Perfusion technology to make organs more widely available to patients who need them around the world. We are thrilled at the prospect of working closely with Lauxera to take OrganOx to new heights in the US and ROW.”

Samuel Levy, founding partner of Lauxera Capital Partners, added: “Although more than 9,000 liver transplants are performed each year in the United States, more than 1,500 people die each year waiting for a liver on the transplant list. This represents only ~3% of the 50,000 Americans who die each year from liver failure. This is unacceptable. Lauxera is proud and honoured to back the OrganOx team and its global commercial scale up.”

This is the ninth investment made by Lauxera Growth I, a growth and growth buy-out fund dedicated to investing in commercial-stage European and North American healthtech businesses.

Hogan Lovells served as legal counsel on the transaction. D'Ornano + Co. served as advisor on certain legal, tax, and financial due diligence matters. MD Compliance advised the firm on manufacturing & supply chain matters and Levine Bagade Han advised the firm on Intellectual Property due diligence matters.