Ohio’s Minimally Invasive Devices begins development on second product

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Minimally Invasive Devices and its founder will use $1.35 million in fresh investment for a fresh start.

The 3-year-old business will use the money to start work on its second product, a kidney stone removal tool. But the investment is also a watershed moment for Dr. Wayne Poll, a longtime urologic surgeon at Riverside Methodist Hospital. He will remain the director of clinical innovation at Riverside’s parent system, OhioHealth, but on Dec. 15 he will stop practicing medicine to focus on Minimally Invasive Devices (MID).

“There’s a lot of entrepreneurial device activity going on in the state of Ohio and a lot of it is physician driven,” Poll said.

Poll got the idea for his company while in the operating rooms at Riverside Methodist. A specialist in minimally invasive procedures, particularly kidney cancer, Poll was frustrated that he needed to clear the tip of the laparoscope that guided him as he worked. That gave birth to FloShield, which stops liquid from gathering at the tip and obstructing the view of a laparoscope.

The device received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval last year and was launched during this summer. It is used in four medical centers and the company expects to complete an agreement with a national distributor during the first few months of next year, Poll said.

Now, new investment will develop a tool that can break up a kidney stone multiple times during the removal process. Current devices can break up a kidney stone once but cannot do it again once pieces are gathered and removal begins, even if a piece is still too large to take out.

This “fragmentation and extraction basket” will be able to continue to break up the stone, Poll said.

The company will spend 2010 developing the device and then begin human testing, Poll said.

There are 150,000 kidney stone procedures annually in the United States, which equates to an $80 million to $90 million market, Poll estimates. However, far less than half of those procedures would require a tool to break up a kidney stone more than once.

Charter Life Sciences and Reservoir Venture Partners provided the company’s latest funding, Poll said.