ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Tioga is developing a durable, broad, and adaptable mitral valve replacement to eliminate mitral regurgitation for patients with both functional and degenerative MR.
Having been incubated within Shifamed, which has a long and successful track record of launching innovative medtech companies, Tioga Cardiovascular has been relatively stealthy until recently, although it set its sights on a transcatheter mitral valve project as early as 2018. The company, which has raised about $77 million to date, first attracted public notice at the closing of its July 2021 $30 million Series B round with a group of investors that includes The Capital Partnership, Cormorant Asset Management, AMED Ventures, and Shifamed angel investors. A February 2023 Series C round brought in an additional $30 million for the war chest, from the same set of investors plus the PA Medtech VC fund.
It was just before the Series A round in 2019 that the company crystallized its mission to develop a transseptal mitral valve replacement device (TMVR). “It took us a long time to get educated on the space,” says Tioga co-founder and CEO Mike Dineen, “and it wasn’t until late 2018 that we started to understand the clinical needs,” thanks in large part to the landmark COAPT trial studying Abbott’s MitraClip, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 2018.
