John Ashley - DurVena, Private Partnering Interview at LSI USA ‘23

Transcription

John Ashley  0:06  

Hello, I'm John Ashley, co founder of Durvena Inc. We're commercializing a novel therapy to strengthen tissue. We're focused on vein graft tissue, which is used in a million surgeries every year in the United States, people are getting veins taken from their leg to use to bypass clogged arteries in their hearts and their legs. But these veins don't have the strength to handle the higher arterial pressure. So they have a limited lifetime. They react to the higher to a pressure by growing tissue and it closes off the vessel. We're stopping that process by putting a dye on the outside of the vein and exposing it to light in our machine here, that light and dye crosslinks the tissue strengthens it. So that vein lasts much longer. We're showing some data here you can see the difference between a treated versus and untreated vein at three months and the one that's treated has a much bigger lumen in it, keeping that blood flowing for the patients. So this is a photochemical process we use a photoinitiator Roseman gall dye that gets put on the outside of the vein. When it's sitting on the outside of vein and we surround it with light that activates the dye, it creates a oxygen molecule that wants to bind and it binds to the collagen in the vein tissue. So it's crosslinking. That collagen strengthening it. This is a covalent bond. So it's non reducible, it's the same fixing of tissue that you get from chemical processes. The difference is we're just doing the outer surface of the vein, and we don't kill the tissue. It stays alive and viable so it can be used for these procedures. The first part of the procedure, the vein is removed from the patient's leg. This is our simulated vein. That's where our product comes into play. We have a procedure tray with all the equipment needed. In that tray comes the dye. We take the dye and apply it to the vein. We clip the end of the vein and grab the cannula. Then we placed this dye covered vein in our vein carrier, this comes in our tray. And when we close the carrier now we're keeping the vein sterile during processing the vein carrier with the vein and it is placed in our light chamber. The light chamber has four LED panels on each side, this is just visible light. And we close the door. There's a quick software check and then the vein carrier turns on, it's blowing humid air across the vein during the treatment to keep it viable. Then there's a five minute light treatment where we're surrounding the vein with light that light is activating the dye causing it to crosslink with the tissue, creating these covalent bonds that are going to strengthen the vein and have it lasts much longer once it's put back into the patient's body. This is a second time here. This has become a very prominent conference for emerging medical device products and we're here to show the world our new product and to continue to raise funds for the companies that can carry us forward