Tristel upbeat on progress at its MobileODT investment

Infection prevention products manufacturer Tristel announced on Monday that MobileODT - a company in which it holds a 2.13% strategic equity stake - has successfully completed its first closing of a $9.75m second-round institutional fund raising.

The AIM-traded firm said the funding was led by OrbiMed Israel Partners, and will provide MobileODT with further growth capital.

While Tristel did not participate in the latest funding round, it had invested $0.91m in MobileODT since June 2017.

It said MobileODT’s ‘Enhanced Visual Assessment’ (EVA) system was a smart colposcope used in more than 40 countries.

In the coming months, it was expecting to launch its ‘VisualPap AI’, which it described as a visual analysis using the EVA System to assist clinicians make point-of-care diagnostic decisions for cervical cancer, at a fraction of the time taken for comparable laboratory tests.

Tristel said it enjoyed a “close strategic relationship” with MobileODT, acting as distributor of the EVA System in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

It had used its chlorine dioxide-based foam technology to develop the ‘Duo EVE’ hand-held disinfectant as an accessory to the EVA colposcope.

Additionally, it said MobileODT had made a “significant contribution” to Tristel's development of ‘3T’, a digital traceability system designed to train, track and trace the disinfection of medical devices.

It comprised a portal for setup, data management and reporting purposes, and an app to record each step of the disinfection process.

“We made our first investment in MobileODT in June 2017 and during the past two years we have seen MobileODT make great strides in its development of machine learnt diagnosis of cervical cancer,” said Tristel chief executive officer Paul Swinney.

“This is a very important area of focus for Tristel as 97% of cervical cancers are caused by human papilloma virus (HPV).”

Swinney said Tristel's chlorine dioxide chemistry had been proven to be one of only a few high-level disinfectants that could quickly and safely kill HPV on medical device surfaces.

“This provides a sizeable market opportunity for Tristel and is of enormous significance for colposcopes that are used to capture images of the cervix.”

At 1059 GMT, shares in Tristel were up 0.25% at 325.8p.