A medical technology business using origami techniques to treat brain haemorrhages has raised £8 million to start human trials.

Oxford Endovascular’s folding concept is inspired by the way satellites unpack their solar arrays. It allows doctors to insert tubes inside the brain’s blood vessels to heal weak spots. Estimated to affect one in fifty people, these are known as aneurysms and can potentially leak or rupture.

Parkwalk Advisors led the company’s second big funding round, being called a Series A+, along with Norcliffe Capital, Oxford University, Oxford Science Enterprises and Vulpes Investment Management. The investment is designed to fund a test programme.

Spun out of Oxford University in 2015, the company has built a team of engineers to develop the product, which is a stent made of a nickel titanium alloy that can in effect reline the blood vessel to take the pressure off.

Mike Karim, chief executive, said: “We use an origami-inspired design, which allows this technology to be cut in one piece and fold down into a tiny space so that it can be inserted through a tiny little tube that goes up into the brain’s blood vessels. When a doctor releases it, because of the special folding technology within it, it opens up very accurately and very precisely, giving the doctor a huge degree of control.”

If all goes to plan the team will apply for human clinical studies next year to take place in 2026, followed by a larger clinical trial, which could mean the product is available to patients from the end of 2028.

Alun Williams, investment director of Parkwalk Advisors, which backs companies coming out of UK universities and research institutions, said the business “is demonstrative of the exceptional ideas currently spinning out of universities in the UK”.

Looking ahead, Karim said he would like to remain in the UK rather than go to the United States as so many others do because “there is more liquid capital around and investors are prepared to take more risk. We are a British company, British innovation from one of the world’s top universities, based in Britain. We have a great future and we’re going to take this technology forwards into the NHS and global healthcare systems and save hundreds of thousands of patients’ lives.”

Oxford Endovascular has also received financial backing in the form of grants from Horizon Europe, the EU’s research funding programme, and Innovate UK, the national innovation agency.