Handheld lung device from Iowa City startup gets $50K state boost

A handheld device designed to let people with chronic lung disease check their breathing from home moved a step closer to patients this month, after state officials approved a $50,000 loan for the Iowa City company building it.

LSF Medical Solutions, co-founded by Melissa Bates, is developing Pneumero — a portable monitor that transmits lung-function readings to physicians so treatment can be adjusted before a crisis lands someone in the emergency room. The Iowa Economic Development Authority board greenlit the Proof of Commercial Relevance loan on May 16, acting on a recommendation from its Technology Commercialization Committee.

The money is earmarked for three buckets: intellectual property evaluation and protection, further product refinement, and market-entry planning. LSF has not said when it expects to seek FDA clearance, begin clinical trials or ship a commercial unit.

The same board meeting awarded identical POCR loans to three other early-stage Iowa companies: Koos Medical Innovations (Ankeny), Terraform Tillage (Eldora) and BioAxis (Indianola). The board also approved two expansion projects in Boone County and Fort Madison expected to generate 60 jobs and $14.6 million in capital investment, plus a $422,000 tourism grant for a Muscatine County event center.

LSF first surfaced publicly in 2022 when Pneumero was honored at an Innovation Challenge Awards ceremony, described then as a cloud-connected app for at-home airway measurement. Since then, the company has not disclosed headcount, additional investors, or formal ties to University of Iowa research or UI Hospitals & Clinics.

The loan keeps a familiar Corridor cycle in motion: university-adjacent concept, state bridge funding, then the long, quiet work of turning prototype into regulated product. What happens next — clinical data, regulatory strategy, payer conversations — will determine whether Pneumero reaches the patients it's built for.