A Pennsylvania medical robotics firm has moved to Middletown, after hiring an East Greenwich resident as its chief executive officer and securing a $500,000 investment from the Slater Technology Fund, a taxpayer-backed organization that supports start-up companies.

The company, Innovention Technologies LLC, was founded two years ago by scientists and doctors at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

It was shepherded by the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, a state-financed institution similar to the Slater fund that promotes the life sciences industry in Pennsylvania.

Last year, the chief investment officer at the Greenhouse, James Jordan, invited East Greenwich resident David W. Wagner — his former colleague at Natick, Mass.-based Boston Scientific Corp. — to consider leading a local start-up company. (Wagner had served on the board of several companies, and he founded the consulting firm Nova Group.)

He chose Innovention Technologies, designers of medical robotic devices for cardiac surgical procedures. The company appointed him chairman, president and CEO and opened a small office in East Greenwich.

The new investment, announced Monday by the Slater fund, will allow Innovention to open an expanded headquarters in Middletown, Wagner said in an interview yesterday.

The company, relying on $500,000 from the Greenhouse, had hired five employees in Rhode Island and three in Pennsylvania.

It now plans to recruit an additional 20 staff members, including scientists, engineers, doctors, sales representatives and marketing personnel over the next three years, Wagner said.

“We are certainly appreciative of their support,” Wagner, 52, said of the Slater investment. “It did make a difference. We could have been pulled to Massachusetts.”

Although not its largest investment, the commitment to Innovention is significant for the Slater fund, representing more than 15 percent of its annual appropriation from the legislature.

But it falls far short of the money needed to support human clinical trials of the company’s robotic device, Wagner said, noting that commercializing a medical device can cost a technology firm $30 million.

The new investment, however, will help the company secure critical venture capital, he said. Innovention is negotiating with several venture capital firms for a total of $9 million. “We’re very far along in discussions,” Wagner said yesterday.

For now, the Slater money will pay for continued pre-clinical work on the company’s prototype, which is designed to provide a less-invasive surgical alternative for cardiac surgery.

Robotic surgery involves smaller incisions and is said to result in reduced blood loss and post-operative pain.

(Beginning last November, Rhode Island patients with prostate cancer have had the option of using the da Vinci Surgical System, a medical robot manufactured by one of Innovention’s competitors.)

Innovention has completed several animal studies, and it recently concluded trial runs using its so-called cardio arm on human cadavers.

The company hopes to begin a human test in South America early next year, and start a human study in the United States by early 2009, Wagner said.

The new investment is in the form of a convertible note, a loan that Slater hopes to convert into an equity stake in Innovention.

If the investment is not restructured, the interest and principal would be due in a lump sum in five years, according to Richard G. Horan, Slater’s senior managing director.

“This is a nice coup,” Slater spokeswoman Laura Nelson said yesterday. “It is now officially headquartered here. We have wooed them away from Pittsburgh.”

bgedan@projo.com