Freedom Meditech Raises $4.8M to Commercialize Ocular Scanner

Freedom Meditech ClearPath DS-120 (Freedom Meditech image used with permission)

Freedom Meditech, a San Diego medical diagnostic company, said it has raised $4.8 million in a Series C financing round, bringing total venture funding to about $14 million in the nine years since the company was founded.

The company also named John Gerace as CEO and as a member of the company’s board of directors.

Gerace previously headed the applied sciences division of Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies, leaving at the beginning of 2014 as Waltham, MA-based Thermo Fisher Scientific completed its $13.6 billion acquisition of Life Technologies. Before that, Gerace served as vice president and general manager of the PCR systems business at Life Technologies.

Gerace also recently co-founded San Clemente, CA-based Calabri Biosciences, which manages a portfolio of assets involved in wireless health diagnostics and monitoring.

He is stepping in for founder Craig Misrach, who has served as CEO since Freedom Meditech was founded in 2006. Misrach remains involved, according to a spokesman for the company. He became vice-chairman of Freedom Meditech’s board in April 2014.

In a recent statement, Freedom Meditech said Gerace would oversee all operations, build the management team and lead the company’s fundraising efforts to expand commercialization of the ClearPath DS-120, an ocular examination device.

The technology uses a blue light to scan the eye, which causes the lens of the eye to emit light naturally, or autofluoresce. The system then measures the intensity of the autofluoresence, which has been correlated to the presence of sugar molecules in the eye lens. Higher autofluorescence measurements have been linked to higher levels of sugared proteins that accumulate from aging and the presence of systemic disease, the company says.

The FDA cleared the device in 2013 as a non-invasive method that optometrists and ophthalmologists could use to screen their patients for diabetes. The device also has been cleared for sale in Europe and Canada.

The company’s second product currently in development is a non-invasive ophthalmic glucose monitor that measures glucose levels in the eye for people with diabetes, to replace the finger-prick technologies currently in the market.

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.