MoMelan Technologies, the developer of a device to treat skin disorders by expanding the surface area of skin grafts, has raised $3.5 million, according to the company’s top executive.
MoMelan, based in Cambridge, MA, added KLP Enterprises and Life Science Angels to its existing list of investors, which includes LaunchCapital and Mass Medical Angels. The company will use the Series A money to further develop its device and conduct clinical studies, with the goal of a limited market release in the next 18 months, co-founder and president Sameer Sabir told Xconomy.
“We’re pretty excited,” Sabir says. “We’ve made a lot of technological progress over the past year.”
MoMelan, whose technology was invented in the lab of company co-founder and all-star Harvard dermatologist R. Rox Anderson, raised $1.08 million in seed financing last year.
Anderson and Sabir are keeping a lid on exactly how their device works. Yet the founders said it would be used to expand a piece of skin by up to 100 times its original size to cover an area on the body that is larger than the graft could normally cloak. The device was initially developed at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, of which Anderson is director, for people with vitiligo, a disorder in which patches of skin lose pigmentation. Yet the firm’s founders say the device also has the potential to be used for patients with scars and other skin conditions for which skin grafts are treatment options.
