Image courtesy of Alex Lesman
Location: Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT)
Position: Entrepreneurial Lead, CIMIT's Healthcare Commercialization Bootcamp
Duration: Summer 2015
Description: During a hackathon organized by the Innovation Hub at Brigham and Women's Hospital in fall 2014, I started working with two surgeons (Dr. Keith Ozaki and Dr. Edward Mcgillicuddy) on a new hand-held surgical device to improve outcomes for patients suffering from abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA's). AAA's are often treated with endovascular stent-grafts, but if the stent-graft fails, the removal is difficult and often deadly. Over the next several months, I observed several of their surgeries and with their feedback, developed and prototyped a device that could remove stent-grafts with minimal danger to the patient and the surgeon. As a team, we were accepted to the CIMIT Healthcare Commercialization Bootcamp, which we participated in during the summer of 2015. Though the device held promise, we ultimately determined that the low number of cases (<1000 per year in the US) and the high cost of obtaining regulatory approval prevented the device from being commercially feasible.
Key Achievements:
- Developed and prototyped a medical device
- Determined a regulatory pathway forward
- Presented weekly to a panel of medical device experts and incorporated their feedback