Jennifer Fried, an early-stage health care investor and successful startup founder, has found her next venture.
After starting her last company, Explorer Surgical, while at graduate school at the University of Chicago, Fried has joined Flow Medical, a startup developing a catheter to diagnose and treat blood clots, as a co-founder and its new CEO.
The startup announced a $1 million investment over the summer to help it move to commercialization and step outside the University of Chicago's ecosystem.
It's her past entrepreneurial experience that Fried thinks pairs so well with the rest of the founding team, which includes UChicago researchers Jonathan Paul and Osmanuddin Ahmed, who bring more of a medical background.
"They know so much about the product itself and we're able to work together and take their deep clinical and scientific expertise and marry it with my experience in business in building early-stage health care companies," she told Chicago Inno. "What UChicago does so well is interdisciplinary collaboration — taking business talent from Booth [School of Business] people that are excited about entrepreneurship and finance, and connecting them with the physicians and scientists that are doing great things."
Flow Medical is solving a problem that's personal for Fried.
"My dad was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer that makes him predisposed to blood clotting, so I became interested in understanding more about that," she said.
Fried said Flow Medical wants to find a more data-driven approach to treating blood clots.
"Every clot is different. We need to be personalizing medicine to each patient, and so Flow Medical invented a new smart device that administered the drug and tracks patient information in real time," she said. "There's over 100,000 patients that die from pulmonary embolisms every year, and the physicians that are taking care of these patients don't have the information they need to appropriately customize therapy."
Flow Medical is "deep" in engineering right now with plans to file with the FDA in the second half of 2024, according to Fried.
