By Kathleen Keene
For WisBusiness.com
Imagine receiving the diagnosis that you or a loved one has developed liver cancer. Even with this devastating news, there’s hope: The doctor tells you liver resections, or surgery to remove part of the liver, help improve five-year survival rates.
However, you’re not out of the woods just yet. Liver resections come with their own risks, as with any surgeries. Depending on the surgical tools being used, there can be dramatic amount of blood loss during a resection.
For a healthy patient, one liter of blood is not life-threatening. For a patient who has cancer and has undergone chemotherapy, however, this amount of blood loss could be catastrophic.
Lowering the risks of liver resections is the goal of two medical tools developed by Medical Engineering Innovations Inc., according to CEO and President Richard Schmidt.
The company’s Swiftblade-R resection product and Swiftblade-A tumor ablation tool are a series with disposable electrodes and a generator that utilizes radiofrequency energy to resection cancerous liver tissue. This product is design to compete with liver resectioning tools on the market.
“Almost every other tool utilized uses small needle shaped electrodes, which can char tissue due to a too-high energy input but also can fail to coagulate larger blood vessels resulting in increased blood loss,” Schmidt said. “With the Swiftblade products, the radiofrequency is pumped between linear arrays of electrodes, which results in faster resectioning and more uniform coagulation.”
Many existing tools are more general and used for a wide variety of procedures. The SwiftBlade series is a more specialized type of tool that allows specific radiofrequencies to be set in order to achieve the best possible surgical outcomes.
“The reason many other devices simply aren’t as good is because the tools they use aren’t optimized for the specific procedure at hand,” Schmidt said. “We are focused on making a product that is better than any other for liver resectioning.”
MEI Inc. has conducted more than 20 surgical studies on pigs and has discovered that with this technology, procedure times can be cut by half, larger blood vessels can be coagulated and the amount of blood loss is less than that of a golf ball, Schmidt said.
Clinical trials of these devices will begin in the first quarter of next year in the United States. Following introduction to the U.S. market, the company will seek to enter Canadian, European and Asian markets. Following trials of the liver resectioning and ablation tools, the company will look into other applications of the Radiofrequency generator to such procedures targeting kidneys, pancreas and abdominal trauma.
There are about 21,600 liver resections and 10,000 liver ablations annually in the United States. These numbers have an estimated market value of up to $95 million. Additionally, the hand piece of this tool is a disposable one-time use set of blades, with a market of about $100 million. Following the third year of market sales, the blades alone should account for 90 percent of gross revenue, Schmidt said.
“We’re trying to cure cancer; what better deal is that?” he said.
The company presented to potential investors during the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium, held Nov. 5-6 in Madison.
— Keene is a senior with the UW-Madison Department of Life Sciences Communication.
