Causeway Sensors has raised more than £1.5m in an investment led by the Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Growth Fund, to speed up the “path to commercialisation” for its nanotechnology products.

£1.3m came from the Kernal Capital fund, while a further £250,000 was provided by existing investor QUBIS.

Causeway Sensors uses patented nanotechnology to enable pathogen detection, opening pathways to detect fatal diseases within the healthcare sector. The Queen’s University Belfast spin-out is developing a Nano Sensor Platform that can be integrated into a bioreactor, to give key data in real-time.

The company said pharmaceutical companies need to screen millions of candidates and have to “highly characterise potential leads” to create new biological drugs. Causeway Sensors said current instruments can only capture critical data after “protracted incubation periods”, which increases time and risk.

Causeway Sensors hopes its Nano Sensor Platform will reduce risk, improve decision making and speed up the process of bringing new drugs to market.

Kernal Capital managing partner Niall Olden said: “There is an unmet need for instrumentation that can provide high value data in real time, online, throughout the drug development process, we believe Causeway Sensors can deliver on that need.”

Following the investment, Causeway Sensors has also “enhanced and restructured” its board and executive team. The company’s founder Dr Bob Pollard is taking the role of executive president, while Deirdre Francis – formerly of Intelesens – has been appointed to the newly created finance director role.

Dr Antony Murphy has been promoted as the company’s CEO. He said the latest investment is the “final stepping-stone on the path to commercialisation” of Causeway’s technology.

“This investment, along with the competitive grant-funding we were awarded from UKRI, will put Causeway in a strong position to fully validate our first product with blue-chip pharmaceutical companies before entering the bioproduction market,” Murphy said.

Causeway Sensors is part of the Northern Irish technology consortium Smart Nano NI, which received £42.4m in funding last year to develop nanotechnology related to medical devices, communication and data storage. The company confirmed that it received £3.3M in grant support earlier this year from UK Research and Innovation as part of this consortium.

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