Thanks to the Mid-America Angels, ELIAS Animal Health is armed with a significant injection of new funding.

MAA, which includes the Women’s Capital Connection, said that it closed more than $1 million in investment last week with two local companies.

One of last week’s companies was ELIAS. Thirty investors were part of the deal with the Olathe company.

The funding will allow ELIAS, a subsidiary of TVAX Biomedical, to continue and expand testing of its immunotherapy for canine cancers. More veterinarians will have the ability to offer the startup’s treatment to the animals they’re seeing.

So far, ELIAS has shown that its treatment can let dogs with bone cancer live longer. The company wants to see if its solution will also be effective against lymphoma and other types of cancer.

“Cancer is a devastating disease for people and their pets, with millions of dogs diagnosed annually in the United States alone,” said Tammie Wahaus, CEO of ELIAS Animal Health.

“This additional round of funding allows us to expand our canine clinical trials to more locations across the country and presents an opportunity to gather a wider set of data on therapy outcomes which will help us better understand our T cell-based immunotherapy’s potential to treat other forms of canine cancer.”

The ELIAS deal continues a very active for 2017 for MAA. So far this year, the organization has facilitated more than $1.8 million in investment across five deals. If it keeps up the pace, MAA could top its total of $3.6 million from 2016.

“We are pleased to add two new companies to the MAA portfolio this year,” said Rick Vaughn, MAA’s managing director. “In addition, the fact that so many of our existing portfolio companies are continuing to grow is a great sign. This balance of maintaining our commitment to growing companies in our portfolio while also deploying capital to new, promising companies throughout the region has been key to our success over the years.”