Leversense CEO Pete Nagy doesn't have a particular affinity for fluids like blood or urine. But after selling his fiber-optics business to a Fortune 100 company, Nagy was looking for his next project and found himself in the laboratories of Drexel University's
Dr. Raj Mutharasan. Mutharasan was working on a testing technology that could remain sensitive in dirty, unprocessed materials. Nagy, a career tech entrepreneur, immediately saw the commercial applications and decided to seed fund Leversense, making blood and urine testing his mission.
"The sensitivity we have is pretty extraordinary," says Nagy. "Most products out on the market require a lot of steps, a lot of processes in order to get samples to testing. It is usually very expensive and requires you do it in a lab and not in a practical setting."
This week, the company announced a new
Ben Franklin Technology Partners investment of $300,000 for continued development efforts, getting Leversense ready to approach a waiting market with its biosensor diagnostics. In the months spent testing the technology, Nagy has been telling everyone who will listen, drawing attention from markets he didn't expect. One market has been food testing. The average food sample is much more complex and much dirtier than the average human fluid sample so they are much harder to work with. Leversense maintains its sensitivity in milk, which Nagy hopes will give the product great potential in the food-testing market.
"One of the things that attracted me to the technology is how much commercial interest there was," says Nagy. "We have had people approach us about food testing and bio-processing, so we are pursuing those things now as well."
Source: Pete Nagy, Leversense
Writer: John Steele