A $25,000 pilot award from the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI) to develop a device that enables surgery to be performed with a single or even no external incision has been leveraged into nearly a million dollars in funding. The device, based on the work of Yale School of Medicine surgeon Kurt Roberts, M.D., will allow certain types of surgery that are now considered invasive to be done in a minimally invasive manner — including via natural orifice, which may involve no external incisions.
This style of surgery is rapidly emerging as a trend in medicine because it is much easier on the patient. It eliminates most or all external, invasive incisions in the abdominal muscle wall, allowing organs such as the gallbladder and appendix to be removed via a single incision, or in the case of female patients, trans-vaginally. The YCCI-supported device results in a much faster post-surgical recovery, with far less risk of infection, adhesion and hernias in the abdominal wall. Patients are often back to their normal routine within a couple of days.
Roberts is among the pioneers of this growing national trend. Last year, he received a $25,000 pilot award from the YCCI to develop an internal organ retraction device to make this type of operation easier for surgeons to perform, and to explore other novel clinical and translational methodologies.
Yale's Office of Cooperative Research helped spin off a New Haven-based company, NovaTract Surgical, to commercialize the new device so that it can be more widely adopted. Roberts' organ retraction device would facilitate at least two kinds of minimally invasive surgery: laparoscopic surgery through a single incision, or "port," within the umbilicus, which is even less invasive than the widely performed three-port laparoscopic surgery; and Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery, or NOTES, which eliminates all external incisions.
"NovaTract's success illustrates that YCCI's model of helping investigators translate novel research into better patient care is incredibly effective," said YCCI director Robert Sherwin, M.D. NovaTract was founded in April 2010 by Roberts, Eleanor Tandler (CEO of the company) and Yale University. Initial development of the device was funded by a pilot award from YCCI's Clinical and Translational Science Award grant from the National Institutes of Health.
NovaTract got a major boost recently when Connecticut Innovations (CI), the state's quasi-public authority created to stimulate the development of new technologies and products, committed to a $250,000 investment through its Seed Investment Fund. To date, NovaTract has raised almost $1 million in funding. CI previously invested $208,000 via its Pre-Seed Fund and NovaTract has received additional funding from other regional venture groups.
‘‘CI recognized the potential of NovaTract and its innovative technology early on and provided support through our Pre-Seed Fund," said Peter Longo, president and executive director of CI. "We applaud the company for meeting its early goals and earning a new investment from CI through our Seed Investment Fund. NovaTract is well positioned to take advantage of the rising trend toward single-port laparoscopy and the growing demand for hand instruments in such surgeries."