One of MassChallenge's recent winners is a startup that says it has developed the first soft, flexible, bandage-like pump capable of delivering one or more medications simultaneously to a broad range of people, from a diabetic at home to a wounded soldier on the battlefield.
Laurence Alberts, CEO and co-founder of Cam Med, said for many diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and osteoporosis, whose treatment involves frequent delivery of injectable drugs, using continuous-infusion pumps often leads to better outcomes than multiple daily injections, resulting in healthier patients and lower health care costs because they don't run the risk of ending up in the emergency room if they miss an injection.
But many people are unwilling to use pumps currently on the market because they're too visible and "clunky" to wear, Alberts said. So one of his two co-founders, Yanzhe Qin, a visiting fellow at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, thought: Why not make a pump that's an extension of the body?
In May 2013, Qin and his roommate — and now co-founder — Zhifei Ge, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT, began working on the Evopump. At 2 inches by 1 inch by 1⁄4 inch, it is less than half the size of the most widely used pump, Alberts said. And unlike other pumps, which operate with an automated syringe connected to a motor or a metal alloy that expands or contracts to move the syringe, the Evopump is powered by a tiny battery and works through electrolysis.
An electrical current is applied to a material such as water or a salt solution, forming small gas bubbles that create pressure, which moves the medication from the pump to the body. And it can be either pre-programmed or controlled in real time by the patient.
The pump also can deliver multiple medications, making it ideal for medics to use on wounded soldiers, who might simultaneously need a painkiller, a coagulant to stop bleeding and medications to prevent infection and inflammation.
"When Yanzhe approached me through a mutual friend in August 2013, I was just blown away by it," said Alberts, whose background was in strategic consulting. "It was so different and better than everything else in the field. I decided on the spot to team up with them."
In January, the three established Cam Med and a few months later applied to MassChallenge — the world's largest startup accelerator and competition — with "zero expectation," Alberts said, of walking away with $50,000, money they'll now use to have a commercially manufactured prototype made so that they can begin to generate the kind of performance data that potential partners look for.
The Evopump still will need to undergo about two more years of testing, followed by another two years or more of clinical trials before it can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, after which Alberts expects it to sell on par with existing devices, which today sell for between $30 and $35, and be available to patients with a prescription.
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