Merchant bank The Aethena Group aims to provide a new kind of resource to emerging and middle market companies that need a boost to get to a valuation level that supports investment by traditional investors. One field in need of such support, Aethena believes, is liver disease, which represents enormous untapped markets, but product risk associated with an evolving understanding of liver biology. Aethena hopes to offer strategic options to companies in this industry.

Gastroenterology, once a market comprised of large, reusable pieces of equipment like endoscopes, ushers in a new era of minimally invasive surgical disposables. Indeed, minimally invasive procedures make it possible for surgical devices to encroach upon drug franchises in several multi-billion dollar markets, including gastroesophageal reflux disease and obesity.

Many scientists and physicians believe in the healing power of heat, but to date, there have been no major commercial successes in hyperthermia. Hyperthermia companies suffer from the field's checkered past: a wave of commercial hyperthermia flameouts in the 1980's means that many investors won't give hyperthermia companies a second glance. First Circle Medical's challenge is to win over skeptical investors and clinicians as it pursues a new device market for hepatitis C. There it aims to offer a side effect free alternative to drugs for a deadly and prevalent disease with few therapeutic options, or, at the very least, a procedure that will potentially boost the efficacy of drugs. But as the first and only player in a new field, and in light of the prejudice against hyperthermia devices that many share, First Circle has to create a base of rigorous scientific data from scratch; indeed, it has to bear the burden of doing everything right.

First Circle's innovation, extracorporeal whole body hyperthermia, involves the heating of a patient's blood {in vitro} to raise core body temperature, which has application in the treatment of disseminated cancers and infectious disease.