18/08/2021
Today, on Panorama, there is an interview to Giovanni Manfredi, chief executive officer of Novavido. In the article, signed by Cristina Bellon, he explains how the “liquid retina” works and how Novavido wants to translate its technology to human.
01/07/2021
Today, G-Factor demo day took place at Opificio Golinelli in Bologna. The event hosted an audience of 160 people coming from the economical and financial world together with representatives of the technological innovation sector.
7 startups were selected following the I-Tech Innovation 2021 call of CRIF and Fondazione Golinelli. The startups presented themselves after their acceleration path done under G-Factor, the incubator-accelerator of Golinelli. They illustrated their business idea and their propositions, related to the Life Sciences/Digital Health, Fintech/Insurtech and FoodTech/Agritech sectors.
Among the startups, Novavido presented its development idea and its technology.
Demo Day marks the end of the first part of the G-Force program that the 7 startups are following and that will lead to the Investor Day in the end of November. The G-Factor acceleration program is not based on academic formation but on startup coaching: the path is created on the basis on the concrete specific needings of each startup and is tailored around it to supply a relevant and material support to each project and team.
21/05/2021
Today Novavido S.r.l. has been founded. It’s an innovative startup aiming to develop a new therapy that could potentially revolutionize the treatment of retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration.
Following a joint investment of Alfasigma, Utopia SIS, Istituto David Chiossone, and Club 2021, the startup, acelerated by G-Factor, secured a 6 million euros investment in two rounds. It can now work to develop its device and translate this vision-recovery solution to the human.
The project behind Novavido forsee the development of a biocompatible device that can be implanted in the posterior part of the eye. This so-called “liquid retina” can potentially recover the vision in people affected by blindness due to eye’s photoreceptors death.
The technology is the results of a 10-years-long research project lead by the Center for Nano Science and Technology (CNST) directed by Guglielmo Lanzani and by the Center for Synaptic Neuroscience and Technology (NSYN) directed by Fabio Benfenati, both being centers of the Italian Institute of Technology. The collaboration also saw the participation of Grazia Pertile and Maurizio Mete from Sacro Cuore Don Calabria di Negrar Hospital in Verona. Together they’ve obtained encouraging preliminary experimental results testing the device in specific rodents that are naturally affected by a debilitating illness very similar to the retinits pigmentosa. The results have been published in 2020 on the important scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology. The liquid retina does not require any external visor, camera, or power supply and can be implanted through subretinic injection, allowing a limitedly traumatic surgical intervention.
