Kidney-transplant company plans to make existing tech obsolete

Almost three decades after being part of the team that revolutionized the transport of kidneys for transplants, the leader of Northernmost is getting close to the green light for a sequel.

The Edmonton-based company is working on a kidney transport device for organ transplants called the NoMo Kidney Pump. It is more efficient at preserving kidneys than the current technology, said founder and CEO Ron Mills, thanks to advancements in machine perfusion (in layman's terms, pumping blood to keep the kidney viable).

Mills was part of the American team at Organ Recovery Systems that is responsible for the LifePort Kidney Transporter, the gold standard of machine perfusion — at least for now.

"Nobody's really done anything in 27 years," Mills told Taproot, noting that the LifePort launched around 2003 and doesn't appear to have changed much since it was first developed. "That's too long for something so good to not have a next act. My unfinished business — if I'm angry about anything — is that we're still using so much static cold storage, those ice coolers, for kidney transport."

Montreal's Innovobot Resonance Ventures believes Mills's company can execute on that next act; it invested an undisclosed sum in April to help Northernmost continue to innovate in kidney perfusion and extend the technology to other organs.

"Ron and his team have done this before," Innovobot said in its announcement. "They helped build the first generation of kidney perfusion technology. Now they're back to make it obsolete … By increasing the share of kidneys that arrive viable and transplant-ready, NoMo directly reduces wait times and saves lives."

That investment, as well as one by the UA Innovation Fund in February, has greased the wheels for a Series A round that Northernmost is raising. He has a good story to tell, and a refusal to settle for anything but the best way to transport kidneys, he said.

"A revenge plot is a legitimate thing that investors look for," Mills said. "Sometimes a really good motivating factor is personal drive, and sometimes that drive can be to get even."

That said, investment is not easy to come by in such a highly regulated field, especially in Canada. The national investment landscape hasn't kept up with innovation, Mills said, "so the capital dollars are not there when you get to that next stage."

Although he's finding "a tough environment right now for deals," the company is making progress, he said.

"A big thing that has happened is the transfer from our design to manufacturing, and that design is pretty much locked and ready to make the small batch of devices that we need to test for (U.S. Food and Drug Administration)," Mills said.

Mills is Canadian by birth and has based Northernmost in Edmonton, but he spent a great deal of his life working in the U.S. While Mills is manufacturing as much as possible in Canada, the key to commercialization is to the south.

"It's not just the beachhead; it's the market in the world, and so it's an obvious place to commercialize," Mills said.