Cardialen closed a $17 million Series B investment led by RiverVest Venture Partners, along with Qiming Venture Partners, HBM Healthcare Investments and Cultivation Capital.

The Minneapolis-based company said it is developing the Cardialen unpinning termination (UPT) therapy, which delivers a sequence of low-energy electrical pulses designed to restore abnormally rapid heart rates to a normal rhythm.

This low-energy therapy is intended to mitigate the negative effects of current high-energy defibrillators by delivering a much more tolerable, less debilitating treatment for patients with heart arrhythmias.

“If you look at today’s defibrillator technology, it uses a very high energy shock, which is effective to cardiovert an arrhythmia,” Jeff Peters, president and CEO of Cardialen, told MD+DI. “What we’re trying to do is use a unique sequence of low-energy pulses to do the same. With this unique sequence of electrical pulses we’re trying to identify the specific spot to cardiovert.”

The financing will be used to advance Cardialen’s clinical program with further human testing of its UPT therapy and begin development of an implantable device.

“With the new financing we plan to continue the therapy development. That means understanding the effectiveness of a sequence of patients,” Peters said. “To do that we are using an external system, not an implantable one, where we test the device for patients that are already going in for another treatment.”

He added, “Priority number two is begin the development of the implantable device, which would look very similar to today’s implantable defibrillators.”

Early human feasibility testing of Cardialen’s UPT therapy suggests that it may successfully treat heart rhythm disorders with substantially lower-energy therapy than is needed by existing defibrillators.