PixCell announced that it had been awarded €2.5 million by the European Commission to accelerate commercialization of its product the HemoScreen.

The two-year award was granted through Horizon 2020's SME instrument, which targets high potential SMEs with groundbreaking products that have the potential to profoundly impact the EU economy and global healthcare.

According to the company the funding will serve to further test its product in different clinical settings and demonstrate its clinical and economic benefits as well as support the scaling up of its production.

The HemoScreen is a portable easy-to-use blood analyzer which can be operated by anyone. It performs the most common blood test: Complete Blood Count within 5 minutes enabling physicians to diagnose and treat their patients during a single visit. The HemoScreen is supposed to significantly enhance workflow efficiency in settings such as ER, Oncology and pediatric departments as well as improve patient compliance and satisfaction.

The technology is based on an innovative Lab-On-a-Cartridge concept which executes a complex lab procedure on a simple disposable without user intervention.  A new physical phenomenon called Viscoelastic Focusing, machine vision and AI harnessed together yield lab-accurate results in a miniature apparatus.

The HemoScreen performance has been comprehensively validated in 3 clinical studies in the US in which operators without any training have tested thousands of blood samples covering a variety of blood disorders showing excellent correlation to high-end lab analyzers. The product is CE marked and expected to be FDA cleared during 2018.

The company says it is developing additional assays based on the same technology which will be performed on the same analyzer using different cartridges. These assays will enable physicians to make more substantiated decisions such as prescribing antibiotics and referral to the ER at the point of care.

Hemoscreen product PixCell Medical Technologies is a privately held Israeli company developing cell-based point of care (POC) diagnostics devices. PixCell's technology is based on Viscoelastic Focusing, a patented methodology, and on a proprietary microfluidic based disposable.