After years of helping others engineer medical pumps, Doug Vincent (pictured), president and CEO of VentriFlo, decided to put a team together to develop a pump for patients whose hearts have to be stopped during surgery.
“No one has been able to replicate a human heartbeat,” Vincent says, explaining that during open-heart surgery, a continuous flow pump keeps blood circulating. But current pumps don’t push blood into all the tiny capillaries the way a human heart would, which means other organs must also recover post-surgery,
he says.
Vincent says the product, the VentriFlo True Pulse Pump, mimics a human heartbeat, creating better blood flow and reducing organ damage.
The team working on the technology has had 14 successful pre-clinical studies on animals at Cleveland Clinic and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. The technology has also received awards recently.
Based in Pelham, VentriFlo won a $25,000 grant at the Sixth Annual Pediatric Device Innovation Symposium in September. (Their initial focus is on pediatric applications as those surgeries often involve congenital issues that require longer, multiple surgeries.)
VentriFlo also won second place in the 2018 TechOut competition, held by the NH Tech Alliance, receiving $100,000 in investment capital.
The recognition and funding come at a critical time. Vincent says the company needs $1 million to begin human testing and will need $6 million to secure FDA clearance.
To achieve the milestones it has reached, VentriFlo secured $3.4 million in investments. Vincent says if he can secure the $1 million in Q1, he should have the data within a year needed to secure the rest of the funding. “We can see the path forward,” Vincent says.