Son’s cancer fight inspires startup

The sight of Neal Piper’s then-3-year-old son, Noah, stuck on the couch all day, tethered to an IV pole with a feeding tube after the boy’s cancer diagnosis in 2019 put his father on a new mission.

Piper, who had 15 years of experience in commercializing health care products, including 10 years in sales, marketing and leadership roles for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, saw a need for technological improvements in tube feeding, a market valued at $11 billion globally. After consulting doctors, patients and hospital administrators, Piper founded Charlottesville-based Luminoah in 2020, raising about $1 million in seed funding to develop a new tube-feeding system. He hired University of Virginia biomedical sciences students as interns, employed a design firm to create prototypes and brought in regulatory consultants.

Luminoah’s system is a “discreet, portable, connected device” that “will completely transform how nutrition is delivered while reducing costs to the health care system,” says Piper. The system consists of a small, pager-sized, rechargeable pump a patient can wear on their belt and attach to a feeding port. A packet of liquid nutrients pumped by the system fits into a pocket and the device collects data on how much nutrition the patient receives — a change from the manual logs patients now must keep. Internal testing shows the device meets the performance metrics of competing products at half the size, Piper says. 

Luminoah participated in Richmond-based startup accelerator Lighthouse Labs’ spring cohort, which included $20,000 in funding. The company won top honors and the people’s choice award at Lighthouse’s annual Demo Day pitch competition in May. That was followed by securing $6 million in Series A funding, which Piper thinks will carry the company through U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, anticipated in 2024. Funders included Fry’s Path Capital, CAV Angels, Virginia Venture Partners and 757 Angels.

Luminoah has “made great progress in building and testing a device that is unique to the market and has attracted outside capital in a very tough fundraising environment,” 757 Angels Managing Director Paul Nolde says. 

By the end of this year, Luminoah expects to grow from four to 12 full-time employees and from eight to 12 part-time contractors, Piper says. He plans to manufacture the first thousand devices in-house and then scale with a contract manufacturer. 

The best news, though, is that his son, Noah, now 7, is cancer-free.