Aurenar, which developed a non-invasive, single-use neuromodulation platform, announced Tuesday a $5.7 million seed funding round to accelerate advancement.
The American Heart Association Ventures’ Go Red for Women Venture Fund and Solas BioVentures led the funding round, with participation from BJC Health and Kaleida Capital.
Aurenar’s V-Link platform delivers transuricalar vagus nerve stimulation to modulate the body’s inflammatory responses to conditions, such as subarachnoid hemorrhages. It was granted breakthrough device designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) June 30.
Aurenar Founder and CEO Eric Leuthardt, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare the idea of using vagus nerve stimulation non-invasively for critical care came about nearly a decade ago.
“Then a colleague passed away in the ICU from a delayed vasospasm after a ruptured cerebral aneurysm,” Leuthardt said. “She was a young, healthy mother of two. It was at that moment that it became clear this was a problem that needed a better solution and VNS could accomplish that.”
Leuthardt said his lab worked on developing the technology and “rising star neurosurgeon” Anna Huguenard, M.D., organized the first pilot trial.
“Together, we discovered early and compelling data that this was a fundamental approach to mitigating toxic inflammation for critically ill patients,” Leuthardt said.
Leuthardt said the body’s response to an injury—regardless of cause—can “increase the risk of complications and death.”
“This is a universal problem in critically ill patients,” Leuthardt said. “In the intensive care unit, it’s not just the diagnosis that brings you in, it's all of the things that happen afterwards that define a patient's outcome. Many of those adverse events can be attributed to elevated levels of inflammation.”
Leuthardt, who launched Aurenar in 2024, said the V-Link facilitates the “brain’s natural ability to modulate systemic and central inflammation,” adding that the approach has been validated by multiple pilot clinical trials at St. Louis-based Washington University.
“Going forward, we are focused on a spectrum of indications around stroke,” he said. “That said, this is a much more general platform technology that can expand far beyond neurologic disease.”
The funding will be used to advance technology and capabilities “to a pivotal-trial-ready company,” according to Leuthardt.
Tracy Warren, Go Red for Women Venture Fund senior managing director, said in a statement the platform “promises to offer a pathway to improve recovery for all patients and especially for women who often experience higher rates of post-stroke complications.”
“The potential for use with other conditions that trigger the body’s inflammatory response, which also disproportionately affect women, makes V-Link the kind of scalable innovation our fund was created to accelerate,” Warren said.