Rick Ducharme and Matt Colpoys know that the life cycle of a medical device startup is long. That’s why they’re planning for commercialization in multiple ways.
They lead Vicora and Ampullae, two medical device startups on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.
“I think one of the best-kept secrets in Buffalo is that people come from all over the world to develop devices here,” said Ducharme, a medical device executive who was recruited about six years ago to the Jacobs Institute.
Vicora solves a specific problem in the treatment of many vascular diseases, such as pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis and stroke. The problem is the existing instrument used to unplug the blood vessel, a catheter, becomes clogged and only unplugs the clot about 45% of the time.
The startup has demonstrated efficacies in its technology, which uses vibrations to unclog catheters, through benchtop testing in simulated environments, Ducharme said.
Ampullae’s technology is a flexible guidewire sensor that acts as an indicator of how much force is being applied to the tip of an endovascular device. The business has tested its core tech and must next prototype the tech into a full guidewire to continue testing.
Both are on their way to getting U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, which is required for clinical testing on humans.
The plan is to continue advancing the technology while seeking to find industry partners to acquire and license the technology to reach commercialization more quickly.
“Most of the large caps don’t have these skillsets internally so they’re looking to acquire pieces of the puzzle to be able to integrate intelligence, big data through analytics (and) robotics from startups like Ampullae and Vicora,” Ducharme said.
Large caps are companies with a market capitalization value of $10 billion or more.
Vicora is currently having those types of acquisition conversations with multiple parties. The goal is for Ampullae to follow that same path.
Both startups have been accepted, effective September 2023, into the University at Buffalo Center for Advanced Technology in Big Data and Health Sciences, a project cost-sharing grant program aimed at growing health and life sciences businesses in New York state.
The size of the grants depend on how much a startup puts in of their own funds, Colpoys said.
Between that and Vicora’s pending National Institutes of Health grant and participation in the Jacobs Institute's Idea to Reality Center, an accelerator program that helps commercialize vascular medical device technologies, the startups can stretch their dollars.
Vicora also hired early this year its first full-time employee, a research and design engineer, to accelerate its progress. The business has filed (but not yet gotten approval on) multiple patents and expects to file pre-submissions to the FDA by year-end.
Ampullae will file pre-submissions to the FDA next year, and expects to hire early next year a few electrical engineers and potentially a handful of technicians, according to Colpoys.
“This gives an opportunity for Buffalo to retain talented people,” he said.
