A newly formed company, Apollo Endosurgery (Austin, Texas), reported that it has secured $11.5 million in a Series A financing round from PTV Sciences, H.I.G. Ventures, and individual investors.

Apollo says this marks its first substantial funding since it received seed money from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB; Galveston) in August of last year.

“What this series of financing will do is to help jump-start our R&D process and to help us bring on more engineers,” Lee Putman, VP of sales and marketing for Apollo, told Medical Device Daily. “Currently out of the 15 staff members we have now, I’d say about 10 are engineers. As we add resources, we hope to expand our engineering team.”

Putman said he did not know at the moment how many additional engineers the company would hire.

The concept of endosurgery is intended to minimize the trauma caused by surgery and to speed up recovery times. Apollo said that the financing proceeds will be used to complete product development and conduct clinical trials in the U.S. for this concept which has minimally invasive surgeries performed through the mouth and into the peritoneal cavity.

Putnam said, “I think our Series A financing should takes us 12 to 15 months out before we seek additional funding.”

“We are very pleased to have launched Apollo with solid venture backing from PTV Sciences and H.I.G. Ventures,” said Dennis McWilliams, president/CEO of Apollo. “We are at the cusp of the re-definition of surgery and this financing will allow Apollo to play a critical role in the evolution of this new market.”

In addition to diagnosing conditions in the peritoneal cavity — the space in the abdomen that contains the intestines and the stomach, the company is saying the tools could be used to treat early stage cancers, remove gallbladders and to treat obesity.

“We’re an early stage company, so we don’t have any products on the market yet,” Putnam said.

The foundation for Apollo was laid in the late 1990s when a group of seven physicians, including gastroenterologists and surgeons from Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Medical University South Carolina, UTMB and Chinese University Hong Kong, formed to share information on natural orifice surgery. The company was then officially launched in the summer of 2006.

With a focus on endosurgery, the company enters into a highly competitive sector — including Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J; New Brunswick, New Jersey) Ethicon Endo-Surgery (Cincinnati) and USGI Medical (San Clemente, California).

In other financing news:

• Simplex Diabetic Supply (Brentwood, Tennessee) has secured an equity investment of $50 million from New Enterprise Associates (NEA). As a part of this investment, NEA General Partners Chip Linehan and Ryan Drant, general partners at NEA, will join the Simplex board.

“NEA shares our vision for leadership and consolidation opportunities in the diabetic testing supplies market,” said Richard Pinson, Simplex chairman. “This infusion of capital will allow Simplex to accelerate and execute its highly disciplined acquisition strategy.”

“We believe that diabetes treatment will become the fastest-growing therapeutic category in healthcare over the next few years” said Larson Douglas Hudson, CEO of Simplex. “Simplex is well capitalized to set new standards in patient care and provide innovative services for the rapid-growth diabetic testing supplies market.”

Simplex was founded in 2007.

• MGT Capital Investments (New York) reported that Tim Paterson-Brown, company CEO and chairman, has acquired 250,000 shares of MGT common stock from an existing shareholder in a single transaction at $3.75 a share, for $937,500.

He said, “It has been my belief for some time now that the value of MGT’s current holdings in its subsidiaries is not accurately reflected in the current share price. Consequently, I have chosen to increase my personal investment in MGT over the past two years in an effort to take advantage of this valuation gap.

“In addition, I believe that our Medicsight [London] subsidiary has tremendous potential for future growth. We recently announced the positive results of the ACRIN Study, endorsing the use of virtual colonoscopy, and we believe that as a result of this study, Medicsight’s virtual colonoscopy technology will see increased future demand.”

MGT is a holding company focused on investments in the healthcare information technology market.