The standard of care for port site closures in laparoscopic surgery may be changing.
Irish medical device startup neoSurgical‘s first commercialized product, neoClose, officially launched this week in the U.S. Today, the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons named the device one of the 2013 Innovations of the Year at the SLS Minimally Invasive Surgery Week Annual Meeting.
neoClose assists surgeons in closing port site defects after laparoscopic abdominal surgery. If it does, in fact, become the standard of care, which is CEO Barry Russell‘s goal for the device, say bye-bye to graspers and retrievers in the OR, laparoscopic surgeons. The minimally invasive device should minimize the number of hernias at port site closures too.
At a port site, there are whole series of layers that need to be closed at a relatively small hole, a task made even harder if the patient has lots of fat. Right now, the most popular method, Russell said, is for a surgeon to go in with a J-needle and suture and try to make a blind insertion of the J-needle.
“Instead of trying to find a better mousetrap or improve what was there already, we said we really need to go back to the basics,” Russell said. He said he thought, “Let’s develop a device that works with the access device that’s already there.”
The “secret sauce” of the device, as you can see in the video above, is the use of absorbable AutoAnchors, which don’t go too oblique or too deep and keep surgeons from needing to “fish” for sutures in the abdomen. Another potential benefit of the device is, opposed to a typical port site closure, the closure neoClose offers has reduced tissue tension closure, which could lead to reduced pain in the patient following the procedure.
While there is a two- to three-use learning curve, Russell said the device requires no “basic retraining” of surgeons.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Russell realized a clinical need for what would become neoClose when he went to pick up his wife from the hospital after a straightforward surgery; she couldn’t be released. She had issues with her port site closure. It was then Russell, who had worked in product development engineering at Boston Scientific (BSX) and sales at Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), decided it might be time to enter the startup space.
He saw that he could “continue up the corporate ladder or try to do something and try to create something.” In 2008, he started neoSurgical.
Since then, the company has received CE marks and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration 510(k) nod for the neoClose earlier this year and recently opened offices in Chicago. In the near future, the company hopes to innovate in the hernia space, particularly in regards to hernia mesh technology and to use neoClose as a platform technology to develop a rich pipeline in the laparoscopic space.
The company will continue to be heavily innovative, so Russell isn’t looking to send neoSurgical the venture capital route. Instead, the startup is actively seeking partnerships and with “tier-1” companies about neoSurgical’s pipeline, Russell said.
