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Peratech has borrowed GBP1.2m ($1.9m) investment from Finance Yorkshire‘s Equity Linked Fund. The British company is developing an Electronic Nose using its award-winning, Quantum Tunnelling Composite (QTC(TM)) material. This new sensor technology detects the presence of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) very rapidly and can recover equally quickly, in a matter of seconds. QTC materials change their resistance when a force is applied and, in this case, the polymer content of the composite swells when exposed to VOCs. One form of Peratech’s sensor uses a granular type of QTC material that provides a high surface area for absorption enabling it to detect levels of VOCs in the region of 10-100 ppm. The sensor rapidly recovers once the VOCs have gone from the surrounding atmosphere and it is the speed of sensing and recovery that marks the difference between QTC sensors and those using other sensing technologies. An additional feature of the QTC technology is that it has very low power requirements.
pSivida Corp. (NASDAQ:PSDV; ASX:PVA) has entered into a securities purchase agreement with institutional investors to raise gross proceeds of approximately $5.36 million in a registered direct offering through the sale of a total of 2,494,419 shares of the Company’s common stock and warrants to purchase 623,605 shares of its common stock. The common stock and warrants will be sold in units, with each unit consisting of one share of common stock and the equivalent of a warrant to purchase 0.25 shares of common stock. Each purchaser will receive warrants to purchase a number of whole shares of common stock equal to 25% of the number of shares of common stock purchased by such purchaser. Each unit will be sold at a negotiated price of $2.15 per unit. Each warrant will be exercisable for one share of common stock, has an exercise price of $2.50 per share and will be exercisable during the period commencing six months after the date of its original issuance and ending five years from date of its issuance.
Moreover, pSivida has signed a funded technology evaluation agreement with a leading global biopharmaceutical company to evaluate pSivida’s Tethadur(TM) protein/antibody delivery technology in the field of ophthalmology. Tethadur(TM) is an application of pSivida’s BioSilicon(TM) technology platform designed to provide sustained delivery of large biologic molecules, including proteins, antibodies and peptides.
pSivida Corp. also announced the National Security Agency of Medicines and Health Products (L’Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Produits de Santé) has granted marketing authorization to ILUVIEN(R) for the treatment of vision impairment associated with chronic diabetic macular edema (DME) considered insufficiently responsive to available therapies. pSivida Corp also announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its Investigational New Drug (IND) application to treat posterior uveitis with pSivida’s injectable sustained- release micro-insert. pSivida is now permitted to move directly to two Phase III trials to treat patients with posterior uveitis. These trials, which pSivida expects would enroll a total of 300 patients, would be in addition to the investigator-sponsored trial studying the same device for posterior uveitis announced last month.