Lauxera Capital Partners has co-led a $142m investment into OrganOx, a commercial-stage, Oxford, England-based medical device company developing & commercializing organ preservation and transportation devices designed to directly save lives by increasing the supply of organs available for transplantation.
A Strategic Investment to Drive Growth and Market Expansion
Lauxera Capital Partners is reinvesting alongside historical shareholder BGF and new investors HealthQuest, Sofina, and a consortium composed of Soleus and Avidity. This investment will allow OrganOx to:
- Expand its investor syndicate with the addition of both Healthtech growth equity and Healthtech public markets-focused institutions
- Secure capital to fortify the balance sheet and invest in continued expansion
- Enhance financial flexibility in preparation for a potential U.S. IPO or strategic M&A exit
Revolutionizing the Field of Liver Transplantation
OrganOx was founded in 2008 by two renowned Oxford University Professors, Peter Friend (Professor of Surgery) and Constantin Coussios (Professor of Biomedical Engineering), as an academic spinoff from Oxford University. OrganOx’s device, metra, preserves donor livers and enables assessment of the organs prior to transplantation reducing organ discard and allowing surgeons to perform transplantations during the working day rather than as an emergency at night.
OrganOx’s mission is to increase the number of organs available for transplantation. Its metra device seeks to re-create an environment for the recovered liver that mimics the human body. In the machine, livers are continuously perfused at physiological pressures using oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The core technology employed by metra has been in development for over 15 years and the device is FDA approved for liver preservation.
Over 5,000 Liver Transplants Supported Worldwide
The rapid adoption of metra is driven by its ability to objectively assess donor organs, allowing surgeons to confidently transplant “marginal” livers that might otherwise be discarded. In a recent randomized European trial1 , donor liver preservation with metra resulted in 50% fewer liver discards and a 20% increase in transplanted livers compared to traditional static cold storage.
Utilizing machine perfusion prior to transplantation enhances patient outcomes by reducing the risk of recipient hypotension and cardiac arrest. As metra offers up to 24 hours of preservation time, surgeons can avoid overnight procedures, thereby reducing surgical complications and improving the sustainability of transplant surgery careers.
Continued R&D Advancements Since Lauxera’s Investment
Since Lauxera’s initial investment, OrganOx has launched multiple research and development initiatives to further advance its life-saving technology:
- Partnership with eGenesis: OrganOx and eGenesis have entered into an exclusive clinical co-development agreement to advance a novel liver support system. This system integrates OrganOx’s normothermic machine perfusion technology with eGenesis’s human-compatible, genetically engineered porcine livers. The collaboration aims to address the critical need for effective treatments for patients with acute or acute-on-chronic liver failure, providing a bridge to recovery or transplantation.
- Kidney Transplantation Technology: OrganOx has expanded its platform beyond liver transplantation, with its kidney preservation device now in human clinical trials, representing a major step forward in improving kidney transplant success rates.
Samuel Levy, Founding Partner, Lauxera Capital said: “We are proud to doubledown on our investment in OrganOx. What a company and what a growth story! We have intensely supported management during this hyper-growth phase across a number of key initiatives: the recruitment of key new functional leaders, driving change efforts via audit and remuneration committee membership and leading the effort to put this round of financing together. We are delighted to partner with Garheng Kong and his team at HealthQuest. Our two entrepreneurial Healthtech investment firms have shared values and shared ambition for this investment.”
Pierre Moustial, Founding Partner at Lauxera further added: “OrganOx is a perfect illustration of Lauxera’s strategy. Its life-saving, patented technology benefits from substantial clinical and regulatory moats. It’s high-quality, high gross margin razor/razor blade model have enabled more than 100% year-over-year revenue growth while driving impressive, positive Ebitda margins. As we deploy our second fund, we continue to identify and invest capital into businesses with these characteristics.”
Piper Sandler acted as exclusive financial advisor and Latham & Watkins acted as legal counsel to OrganOx in this transaction.
About OrganOx and metra
OrganOx is a commercial stage organ technology company, spun out of the University of Oxford in 2008, dedicated to developing technologies to improve outcomes for patients with acute or chronic organ failure. The OrganOx metra® is a normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) platform approved in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Australia, that has been utilized in over 5,000 liver transplants to date to keep donor livers in a metabolically active state outside the body so that functional assessment of the organ can be performed prior to transplant, leading to an increased number of organs available for transplant.
Learn more at www.organox.com
”Although more than 9,000 liver transplants are performed each year in the United States, more than 1,500 people die each year waiting for a liver on the transplant list. This represents only ~3% of the 50,000 Americans who die each year from liver failure. This is unacceptable. Lauxera is proud and honored to back the OrganOx team and its global commercial scale up.
Samuel LevyFounding Partner at Lauxera
