Insulet Corp. , the developer of a fundamentally new insulin delivery system, just raised $50 million in its fifth venture round, with new investors OrbiMed Advisors and the Federated Kaufman Fund joining returning investors Alta Partners, Pequot Ventures, SV Life Sciences (formerly Schroder Ventures Life Sciences), Versant Ventures, as well as founding investor Prism Ventures. [See Deal] This brings the total raised to date to more than $120 million, which sounds like a tremendous sum for a small device company founded just six years ago, but relative to the size of the opportunity it's really not, says Versant's managing director Ross Jaffe, MD. [See Deal], [See Deal], [See Deal]. Jaffe points out that there are 18 million diabetics in the US, of whom 1.2 million have type 1, and there are one million patients who should be on insulin pumps, because they need to inject insulin several times a day to manage their disease.
Insulet has brought insulin pumps into the age of iPods. Unlike conventional insulin pumps, which require patients to be tethered to long sets of tubing and to carry around insulin...
