BeneChill Raises $13.5 Million to Commercialize Medical Cooling Device

Perhaps it’s a sign of the “coolness” of medical device technology in San Diego. Fresh on the heels of Philips Electronics’ purchase of San Diego-based InnerCool Therapies, which uses cooling therapies to treat patients, BeneChill says it has raised $13.5 million in a Series C round of venture funding. In its statement, BeneChill says a new investor, HealthCap of Stockholm, Sweden, led the financing and existing investors MedVenture Associates and NGN Capital also participated, along with the Solon Foundation.

BeneChill says proceeds will be used to fund early commercialization of the company’s RhinoChill, a portable medical device that uses a catheter to deliver a proprietary coolant to nasal passages. Induced hypothermia is currently used in hospitals to treat patients with cardiac arrest, stroke, or head injury. Because the RhinoChill device is portable and requires no external power source, the San Diego company says it is targeting emergency field settings for the product. European health regulators approved RhinoChill in 2007 for use in European Union countries.

BeneChill says it recently completed a randomized study of RhinoChill in cardiac arrest patients, which is intended to show whether the addition of intra-nasal cooling during field resuscitation improves the outcome for people suffering a heart attack in comparison to hospital-based cooling. BeneChill says results of the study will be announced at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Orlando, FL, in November. If the results are positive, the company presumably will seek FDA approval.

Founded in 2004, BeneChill is developing its non-invasive patient cooling applications for field and ambulance care, emergency rooms, and general hospital operations.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.