Galway-based health technology company Luminate, which helps patients to receive cancer treatments at home, is to create 130 new jobs over the next three years.
The group is actively recruiting for roles in software development, electronics, clinical research, mechanical design, and manufacturing to join the team at its Galway office, and for oncology nurses, pharmacists, and healthcare administrators to join its remote US workforce.
Luminate has also raised $21 million (€18 million) in an expanded Series A round, taking its total funding to date to over $50 million.
Luminate said the funding round comes amid “significant interest” from leading US health systems in participating in its Lotus program to deliver home-based cancer care, alongside the launch of the company’s peripheral neuropathy prevention trial at St James’s Hospital, Dublin.
The round was co-led by Lachy Groom and Artis Ventures, with participation from western Alliance Life Sciences alongside existing investors 8VC, Y Combinator, Atlantic Bridge, Faber, SciFounders, Elkstone and others.
Research suggests that patients undergoing chemotherapy treatment spend one in three days in hospital. Luminate helps patients spend more time out of the hospital by partnering with the patient’s oncologist and health insurer to move cancer drug infusions to the home.
Currently, the company is launching nurse-led home cancer treatments across the US, while working towards FDA approval of several autoinjector and monitoring devices that aim to allow patients to do their own cancer therapy infusions at home.
The company plans to use the new funds to launch access to home cancer care at 40 oncology clinics before introducing its patient-led home infusion technology in mid-2026.
Clinical studies of the Lotus autoinjector and monitoring technologies are expected to begin in the first half of 2026.
Luminate was founded in 2018 by Aaron Hannon, Dr Barbara Oliveira and Prof Martin O’Halloran when the group was working as medical device researchers at the University of Galway. Since then, the team has grown to more than 60 people in the US and Ireland.
Separately, Irish medtech company OncoAssure has signed a research collaboration agreement with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. The collaboration will work on a new validation study utilising OncoAssure’s prostate cancer test and curated clinical samples from Icahn.
Icahn is the medical school for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, which includes seven hospital campuses.
The test is a prognostic test designed to support clinical decision-making for men diagnosed with localised prostate cancer. It helps assess the risk of aggressive disease and can be used at two key decision points in the prostate cancer pathway, post-biopsy and post-surgery.
OncoAssure was cofounded by Des O’Leary and Prof William Gallagher in 2021 and is headquartered at NovaUCD in Dublin.