Ablacon is a Wheat Ridge, Colorado-based company that has created a system for precisely localizing and characterizing the sources of AFib and to guide targeted therapy by visualizing the Electrographic Flow within the cardiac chambers. To build on this technology, Ablacon announced it has raised $21.5 million in a Series A round led by Ajax Health. Specifically, Ablacon is planning to advanced its technology pipeline and finance clinical trials with this round of funding.
In conjunction with this funding round, Ajax Health CEO Duke Rohlen is joining Ablacon as Chairman and CEO. Rohlen has had a number of success stories including the exits of EPIX Therapeutics, Spirox, CV Ingenuity, and FoxHollow Technologies.
“Since our first meeting with Ablacon, we have been impressed with the caliber of the team and the promise of the technology to improve patient care in AFib. I’m thrilled to join the team to advance this exciting project,” said Rohlen.
Ablacon’s founder and former CEO Professor Peter Ruppersberg is going to remain with the company as President and Chief Scientific Officer. Ruppersberg explained that the team is looking forward to working with Duke and his team of experienced healthcare executives to bring this technology to market.
“The Ablacon system is a very promising innovation in AFib mapping,” added Vivek Reddy, MD — the Helmsley Trust Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “The early clinical experience indicates tremendous promise of this technology to improve our ability to treat this challenging disease.”
And Ablacon’s advanced mapping system guide for treating of atrial fibrillation (AFib) uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and visualize the flow of action potentials (or Electrographic Flow) within the heart in order to identify sources and drivers of AFib — which is the most common cardiac arrhythmia worldwide. The map of the Electrographic Flow is able to guide physicians in targeted catheter ablation therapy.
“The idea to leverage techniques and algorithms from computer vision to analyze electric signals in the heart is ingenious. Ablacon combines concepts from both the medical world and machine intelligence in a way that I think is very promising,” said Leibniz Prize holder Daniel Cremers (Professor and Chair for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition at the Technical University of Munich).
