A startup spawned from a lab at the University of California, Berkeley has won investor support to work on its patented needle-free injector, which it hopes can make therapies that traditionally require daily self-administered medicines less painful.

NovaXS Biotech, founded by 21-year-old Berkeley researcher Alina Su in 2020, recently closed a $1.5 million seed round led by Lei Ming, an angel investor known for co-founding Chinese search giant Baidu in 1999. Other investors included Chinese venture capital firms Taihill Venture and NewGen VC as well as American ones: Courtyard Ventures, a fund focused on UC Berkeley startups, MHub Impact Fund, an innovation hub based out of Chicago, medical device maker Baxter, and Edward Elmhurst Health, an integrated health system in Illinois.

NovaXS's injection gun, which patients can snuggly hold in their hand, can push biologics into the body's subcutaneous and intramuscular level within 0.3 seconds using liquid pressure. The device also comes with a cloud-based platform that collects patient information for physicians, like injection time, frequency, dosage volume, and medication temperature.

The startup has found two early use cases already -- in vitro fertilization and drug delivery for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Su is particularly passionate about the treatment of the latter. DMD, an inherited disease caused by defects in a gene that encodes the protein critical to muscle functions, can put patients in wheelchairs by the age of 12. There is an existing FDA-approved solution that uses an Adeno-associated virus (AAV) to deliver modified genetic material to cells impacted, but the treatment can potentially generate adverse side effects.

Recent advancement in gene-editing technology has given the once incurable disease new hope, though much needs to be done to actually turn the lab work into commercially viable solutions. That's what NovaXS aspires to do, with Su bringing her bioengineering professor Irina Conboy's gene-editing CRISPR therapies to DMD patients using the startup's needle-less injector.