Cytovale has raised $100 million in venture capital funding to support its rapid test for determining a patient’s sepsis risk in the emergency room.
The company’s nine-figure series D follows up on the $84 million financing round it collected less than one year ago—not long after the commercial debut of its IntelliSep screening platform in August 2023.
Cleared by the FDA in 2022, the approach literally squeezes white blood cells for information on the state of the body’s immune system: applying physical pressure causes the cells to react differently, with patterns found between septic and non-septic patients. Within eight minutes, IntelliSep assigns one of three risk groups based on the chances of sepsis developing during the following three days.
Cytovale aims for its test to become as ubiquitous as urgent blood troponin screening for detecting heart attacks and cardiac damage, or CT scans for diagnosing strokes—while sepsis is more common than those two conditions combined.
“Sepsis is the largest single condition presenting to the emergency department where there hasn't been an effective diagnostic to quickly and effectively triage patients. Cytovale's IntelliSep test has now been demonstrated, prospectively, to help save lives and money by doing just that,” said Parker Cassidy, a partner at Sands Capital, which led the company’s series D round.
The round also welcomed a new investor in the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, known as CPP Investments, as well as Cytovale’s returning backers at Norwest Venture Partners, Global Health Investment Corporation and Breakout Ventures.
According to the company, at Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, where the IntelliSep test first launched, the hospital has reported it has been able to detect and initiate treatments for hidden cases of sepsis more than an hour earlier than before—and that it has also seen a 30% decrease in a risk-adjusted index of sepsis patient mortality. Patients screened with IntelliSep were also discharged earlier.
Earlier this year, Cytovale put forward a peer-reviewed study that included data from about 1,000 patients, showing that it could nearly rule out the possibility of sepsis with a negative predictive value of 97.5%. The study also outlined a positive predictive value of 55%.