HoliStick, a France-based surgical device spinout exploiting research from multiple institutions, made its public debut on Thursday with an undisclosed sum of cash from VC firm Truffle Capital.
Harvard University’s tech transfer arm, Office of Technology Development, has granted HoliStick a licence to commercialise technology co-owned by Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital.
The company is working on a catheter device that would make it easier for surgeons to conduct operations on defective organs. The catheter is designed to close internal punctures with adhesive materials while avoiding conventional stitches or rigid devices.
HoliStick was conceived by Conor Walsh, an associate professor of engineering and appliances at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and faculty member of Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Walsh was helped by lead scientist Ellen Roche, a former SEAS doctoral candidate who now works as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.
Pedro del Nido, chief of cardiac surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital who also practises at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and Jeffrey Karp, a principal investigator at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at HMS, also assisted with HoliStick’s founding research.
Their work was supported by US government-owned research agencies National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
Conor Walsh said: “Part of our lab’s goal is to develop disruptive technologies that augment or restore human performance, and in this case we have developed a technology that augments a doctor’s ability to perform a medical procedure.”
“Ellen’s brilliant leadership of this project and the essential input of our engineering and clinical colleagues have resulted in the creation of a less invasive, less traumatic device that could really improve the way difficult tissue repairs are performed and, hopefully, reduce the need for procedures like open-heart surgery.”
