Luminate’s wearable device for hair retention during chemotherapy treatment is getting the testing it needs for commercial release, but the startup is already looking ahead to its next goal: powering at-home cancer care. A new $15 million funding round should help it make a start on it.

The startup is one of the most unusual, but promising, ones we covered in 2021. The pitch sounds a bit sci-fi: a helmet called Lily that people undergoing chemotherapy wear to prevent hair loss, which is a common side effect of the treatment.

It sounds magical, but it’s actually quite simple: By applying even pressure across the entire scalp, the helmet blocks off capillaries and prevents the toxic chemo cocktail from reaching the patient’s hair follicles. This was sufficient, CEO and founder Aaron Hannon explained, to prevent 75% of people from losing their hair in the company’s first tests.

“We’ve had patients finish four to 12 chemo treatments and keep a full head of hair. There’s been incredible feedback about how it’s changed their experience of going through treatment,” Hannon said. The tests also revealed that there are few, if any, safety, comfort, or device issues, and that in fact wearing the helmet for longer improves outcomes. That’s about as good a result as you can expect, though with only a handful of patients, Luminate now has to step it up for its U.S. debut.

“The next step is a multi-center study in the U.S. for FDA clearance there. New York, Florida, potentially Ohio — we’re openly enrolling sites that want to trial the technology,” Hannon said. The study would involve 85 patients for seven to eight months, potentially starting in November.

Luminate has other irons in the fire beyond the laborious FDA approval process. Its success in this oncology-adjacent area has shown its team new opportunities to help people in treatment.

Hannon said that the team identified chemo-induced neuropathy — basically, nerve damage at the extremities — as another common side effect that the same pressure technology can potentially reduce. It’s basically like a precision compression sock or glove; indeed those garments are already used with some effect, he said, but the wearables they’re working on do it in a predictable, exact way.

Being so conceptually close to Lily, Lilac (as they’re calling the glove-boot combo) makes sense to pursue as Luminate’s next medical device; a lot of the work is already done. “It took us maybe two years to go from pre-clinical to completing a first patient trial showing efficacy for Lily; it took us one year for Lilac,” Hannon said.

It also fits into a greater, long-term strategy and ambition: to help bring cancer care to the home.

Oncology is highly dependent on special equipment usually located in care centers. But for many patients, going to the hospital is difficult, time-consuming, even painful. Any care that can be done in the home ought to be, but chemotherapy is impractical due to how it’s administered. Not only that, but pre-infusion blood work and paperwork mean a two-hour session might take four or five all told.

Yet with cancer diagnoses coming earlier in life and treatment lengths growing, care centers may not have the seats available to treat as many people as they’d like to in a timely way (and delay has deleterious effects). Other than building out more chemo seats at great cost, what can be done?

“Our broad vision right now is we want to help deliver cancer treatments at home,” Hannon said. Though this is still a ways out, he explained that the company is working on a way for patients to do blood work, pre-infusion assessment, and actual chemo treatment themselves.

This is nowhere near ready, of course, and Hannon was clear the company isn’t rushing toward anything. But it is “building something to let [patients] do the blood draw themselves, then looking at how to do low complexity, safe chemo at home. We’re looking at something like an auto-injector to access existing subcutaneous ports.”

Just as home care for other chronic and acute diseases has become more common, Luminate hopes that home cancer treatment will grow more realistic as companies invest in it.

Luminate will be spending out of a new funding round, a $15 million Series A led by Artis Ventures, with participation by Metaplanet, Lachy Groom, 8VC, SciFounders, and Faber, along with some individuals.

The near term, Hannon said, will see the company building out its U.S. clinical presence, including teams for testing, training, marketing, and so on as the clinical trials here progress.