Gilbert Technologies raises €7 Million to redefine treatment for lung patients

Gilbert Technologies, an early-stage medical device company developing a soft mist inhalation device to improve treatment for difficult-to-treat lung conditions, completed a €7 million Seed and Series A investment round. The investment round is led by Dutch deeptech investor DeepTechXL and joined by existing shareholders NanoCorp and Delft Enterprises. Brabant Startup Fonds also became a shareholder by converting its start-up loan to the company. The equity financing of €4 million is supplemented by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO.nl) with an innovation credit of €3 million.

Gilbert will use the funding to advance its customizable electrospray drug delivery platform, utilizing its proprietary electrohydrodynamic atomization (EHDA) technology, into a smart handheld medical inhaler device that offers the potential to improve the effectiveness of therapies for lung patients significantly and to reduce the burden on the health systems.

Gilbert is an emerging player in respiratory medical devices, offering a solution for more precise pulmonary administration of advanced pharmaceutical compounds. Generating a customizable monodispersed aerosol, the Gilbert electrospray technology promises to target a high drug concentration to the diseased areas of the respiratory tract. An additional aim is to replace systemic administration (oral, IV, subcutaneous) of costly therapies with local inhalation to improve patient outcomes for difficult-to-treat respiratory and other conditions and reduce medical costs.

More than 4 million people die each year from a lung disease

Prof. Dr. P.N.R. (Richard) Dekhuijzen, Emeritus Professor of Pulmonology, Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen, points out that chronic lung diseases remain the third leading cause of death and disability worldwide. “More than 4 million people die each year from a lung disease, which has increased substantially over the last few years since the Covid-19 pandemic. Inhaled drug delivery is the cornerstone in managing patients across a spectrum of respiratory diseases. Gilbert’s electrospray technology has the potential to offer benefits to patients for aerosolized medication targeting of more complex and advanced molecular entities for respiratory diseases and for pulmonary administration of molecules for other disease areas.”

As a first target, the company wants to improve anti-infective, biological, and oncological treatments with their smart precision inhaler solution in joint development with biopharmaceutical company partners. Maurits Huigen, CEO of Gilbert, said: “This financing round validates our vision to make medical treatment easier and more effective, to save lives and help patients live the life they want while reducing the burden on healthcare systems. We are looking forward to the next wave of growth that lies ahead from becoming clinical to a commercial-stage company by getting to key inflection points on the development of our investigational device and partnerships with pharmaceutical companies for our first drug-device combination.”