Medical technology, or Medtech, is a burgeoning market that is expecting exponential growth over the next five years. Evaluate’s latest global Medtech review forecasts worldwide sales to grow 5.1% to $522 billion by 2022. This highly diversified industry offers a lot of opportunities to Medtech startups that bring innovative medical devices to the healthcare industry with the goal of not only saving money but most importantly, saving lives.
Why Are Medtech Startups Vital?
Medtech is already transforming the healthcare industry through brilliant innovation and improved research tools. These benefits are just the beginning of the limitless opportunities this growing market has to offer. Some benefits of that Medtech startups provide include:
- Saves lives through the ability to quickly and accurately diagnose diseases as well as prevent them through new testing methods
- Improves healthcare quality and allows patients to live more productive and independent lives, as well as gives hope to chronically disabled or ill patients
- Enables community treatment outside of hospitals and allows patients to receive treatment from the comfort of their homes
- Relieves pressure on the healthcare system by allowing systems to work more efficiently and enabling less invasive procedures and home healthcare
- Positively impacts society as a whole through ensuring citizen health by raising surgery success rates, lowering recovery time and preventing issues before they occur
- Commitment to safety by bringing together the best healthcare professionals, engineers, biochemists, and governments to create safer systems. The Medtech sector fully realizes that patient trust and confidence is crucial
- Fosters economic growth and job creation through its broad global impact
Imagine how big of an impact Medtech startups will have in the next five years at the rate they are growing today. It truly is an exciting revolutionary time for the healthcare industry, and BizVibe wants to highlight the 20 best Medtech startups that will dominate in 2018.
Must Read: Future of Healthcare: Innovative Medical Devices
Technology and healthcare go hand-in-hand, and these top 20 Medtech startups are the perfect example of future innovators are helping to shape the developing healthcare landscape. BizVibe’s top 20 list of the Medtech startups in 2018 includes some of the most cutting-edge medical technology companies the world has to offer.
Top 20 Medtech Startups to Watch in 2018
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Basil Leaf Technologies
Basil Leaf Technologies won the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize in 2017 with their DxTER technology that uses AI-based engineering. It learns to diagnose medical conditions through clinical emergency medicine findings and data analysis collected from real patients. Current algorithms in the tricorder prototype can diagnose 34 medical conditions including diabetes, atrial fibrillation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, urinary tract infection, sleep apnea, leukocytosis, pertussis, stroke, tuberculosis, and pneumonia.
A collection of custom, non-invasive sensors collect data from a patient’s vital signs, body chemistry, and biological functions. The system then pulls together data from a patient’s personal and family medical history, physical exams and the sensors to determine a quick and accurate diagnosis. Basil Leaf Technologies’ goal is to enable consumers the ability to diagnose and monitor their health in the comfort of their own home, without any medical training.
Basil Leaf technologies were founded in March 2013 by two brothers, Dr. Basil Harris and George Harris. As an emergency medicine physician and network engineer, respectively, they combine their experience over the last 20 years to help bridge the gap between medicine and technology. The rest of their team, consisting of the best in healthcare and technology, to excel in medicine, surgery, programming, signal processing, hardware design, medical sensors, user experience design, health policy and mobile tech.
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Allotrope Medical
Over three million abdomen and pelvic surgeries occur in the United States every year, and not enough is done to prevent accidental injury to the ureter. This $3.2 billion problem could be remedied if current methods were able to safely and easily allow surgeons to identify the ureter during minimally invasive surgeries using electrical stimulation. Allotrope Medical has created a medical device innovation that does exactly that using a hand-held, single-use, battery powered device.
The benefit of Allotrope’s technology is that it improves patient outcomes by shortening OR time, decreasing complication probability, decreasing the time spent in the hospital and saving both the healthcare providers and patients money. Simply put, this innovative medical device removes the need for additional pre- and post-op procedures by ensuring surgeons don’t injure the ureter.
Allotrope’s device is awaiting FDA approval but has been efficiently demonstrated in large animal models. So far the company has received $350k in seed funding and is seeking $3 million for Series A funding. The funds will allow the company to achieve some of its next milestones including:
- Partnering with a product development firm
- Completing the alpha prototype
- 501(k) FDA clearance
- Entering marketplace in Q1 of 2019
- Gaining early entry into hospitals
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Catalia Health
Robotics is a major theme occurring in new Medtech startups and Catalia Health is at the top of the AI game. Current solutions include their intelligent, Mabu personal healthcare companion who creates a personal relationship with the patient. With the user’s healthcare information, current treatment plans, interests and even personality, Mabu creates custom conversations tailored to each patient’s unique circumstances. Users interact with Mabu for long periods of time to help manage their treatment plans and gather data about progress, which is unlike any other app.
Some of Mabu’s functions include scheduling and dosing medications, employing diagnostic technologies and creating, scheduling and promoting nutrition and exercise plans. Mabu also collects information about side effects, the patient’s health and satisfaction and the outcome of the therapies. Mabu also knows about basic healthcare and can offer tips and basic medical advice.
Catalia Health was founded in late 2013 as a result of Cory Kidd’s 20 years in applying robotics to healthcare. His previous endeavors at MIT’s Media Lab and the Boston University Medical Center, where he helped develop a series of robots to function as weight loss coaches, set the stage for his current successes. After the failure of that undertaking, Kidd created Catalia Health. He has seen wild success after pitching Mabu as a robotic aid of chronic disease management to healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies around the world.
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Frequency Therapeutics
New Medtech startups, like Frequency Therapeutics, develop small-molecule pharmaceuticals to activate progenitor cells that create new, healthy tissues. Founded in the labs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, Robert Langer, Sc.D., and Jeff Karp, Ph.D., figured out a way to heal cells and tissues without invasive surgeries or dangerous therapies. In 2015, Frequency Therapeutics was born in hopes the founders and their skilled team would share the breakthrough treatments that destroy damaged tissues and create new, healthy ones.
This profound pharmaceutical therapy creates a category of its own in disease-modifying therapies. The main therapeutic program focuses on chronic noise-induced hearing loss, which affects over 48 million in the U.S. alone. Other pharmaceutical therapies help to treat skin disorders, aid in muscle regeneration and cure gastrointestinal diseases.
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Abreos
Abreos Biosciences focuses on personalized medicine with the goal of treating patients as individuals and providing the best-personalized dosing of biological therapeutics. This Medtech startup realizes that patients process powerful biochemical drugs differently. In order to efficiently care for people suffering from illnesses like cancer and chronic autoimmune disorders such as Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, the dosing must be properly measured and analyzed.
Abreos’ Verite platform vastly improves patient care and eradicates unnecessary costs through a diverse portfolio of laboratory and point-of-care tests that directly monitor a patient’s blood concentration of biological drugs. The data helps researchers and clinicians properly dose the drugs and also alerts of any negative side effects. Current methods are time-consuming and often unstable, creating highly variable and expensive procedures that don’t offer a reliable measure of a drug’s effective concentration.
Abreos Biosciences was founded in 2013 by CEO, Dr. Bradley Messmer and focuses on developing point-of-care device technologies and blood monitoring therapies. This company was chosen as one of 20 Medtech startups to participate in the Medtech Innovator Accelerator and recently closed a $1.2 million seed round, totaling $3.5 million from grants and equity funding.
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Ivenix
Modern infusion pump techniques have room for significant improvement, and Ivenix has come to develop an innovative solution to remedy the current problems. Their fully integrated technology resolves issues such as insufficient mechanisms that ensure drug library compliance, difficult non-intuitive pumps, limited availability of timely/actionable data and disruptions to clinical workflows.
This new infusions device offers nurses and other healthcare providers a system that connects the clinician with patient-specific knowledge, accurately delivers infusions and securely manages patient’s infusion data and integrates it with the EMR and other clinical information systems. The device also boasts an advanced drug library with built-in dose protection and drug incompatibility alerts shown to clinicians on a large color touchscreen with simple navigation.
Ivenix was founded in 2007 and has acquired over $52 million in funding. The company’s goal was to develop a new and safer way to deliver infusions. Medtech veteran, Stuart Randle has successfully led his team to victory. In their most recent news, Ivenix demonstrated their innovative Medtech device at the American Society of Health System Pharmacists (ASHP) in December 2017.
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Madorra
Madorra is a top Medtech startup that helps to progress women’s health. Menopause often comes with unpleasant side effects that can decrease one’s quality of life. The Madorra team now offers patients an innovative medical therapy to prevent vaginal dryness. This at-home medical device counteracts the natural decrease of estrogen levels associated with menopause without the use of any hormone treatments.
There are currently no effective, non-hormonal treatment options, which makes Madorra a savior to the 32 million women suffering in silence in the U.S. alone. Madorra’s innovative medical device won first Prize at OEN’s Angel Oregon Showcase in 2017, bringing home a $275,000 prize.
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Selio
Selio Medical is a new Medtech startup based in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin. Colm McGarvey and Dr. Garrett Ryan founded the medical device startup in order to solve a very important problem. Lung biopsies that diagnose lung cancer can cause 1 in 3 patients to suffer from a collapsed lung: a pneumothorax. This extremely painful side effect followed by an expensive procedure to fix ($11,000 per patient) will soon be eliminated by Selio Medical’s revolutionary new approach to preventing a pneumothorax before they occur.
With Selio’s way, the procedure is performed using a single-use device that temporarily seals the needle access route into the lung. When the biopsy occurs, Selio creates an airtight seal that prevents any air leaks into the lung during or after the procedure, thus eliminating the risk of pneumothorax. Selio is a simple and effective way to ensure patient safety and has been rigorously tested in lab settings and in subsequent acute preclinical studies with positive results. By Q3 2018, Selio is hoping to conduct their first-in-man study. They raised $706,000 in non-dilutive grant funding and are now raising Series A funding of $4.6 million that will allow the technology to be submitted to the FDA and CE by 2021.
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VerteCore
Co-founders Paul Leake and Paul Montalvo want to give the millions of people suffering from back pain worldwide hope that one day they will live without chronic pain. Their VerteCore Lift™ provides relief from most sources of back pain and spinal discomfort caused by numerous conditions like bulging discs, SI joint dysfunction, pinched nerves, sciatica and functional scoliosis.
The VerteCore Lift works similar to a car jack with the handles on either side of the device simultaneously “jacking up” the brace until back comfort is achieved. The brace creates more space between the spinal discs, generating inverse pressure within the discs and assisting the return of blood flow while also reabsorbing the bulging disc material. All this helps promote the body’s natural healing ability.
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RenovaCare
The CellMist system from RenovaCare aims to revolutionize America’s $45 billion wounds and burn treatment market. This innovative medical device uses the patient’s own stem cells to regenerate severe burns and other wounds with a simple spray. A quick-healing and non-invasive spray will soon replace conventional skin graft surgery, which is painful, prone to complications and heal slowly.
Preliminary case studies show that patients can be treated within 90 minutes of entering the Emergency Room. Through isolating, processing and ultimately spraying the patient’s own stem cells on top of wound sites for rapid healing, this Medtech device is different from the others on the market. CellMist requires only a small, stamp-sized skin sample from the patient, takes only 90 minutes to start working, needs zero skin grafting and patients can be safely discharged from the hospital a few days after treatment.
Read More: Top 15 Innovative Medical Devices Shaping the Medical Industry
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Prellis Biologic
Dr. Melanie Matheu PhD and Dr. Noelle Mullin PhD, founded Prellis Biologic in 2016 with the hopes of cracking the code to creating microvasculature, a system of tiny blood vessels in human organs and responsible for microcirculation. The two women, with their team of tissue engineers, and physicists have revolutionized the 3D printing of organs, printing the first ever human-created microvasculature.
Their technology creates an entirely new process of printing cell-containing, functional organoids in a way that doesn’t require cell-seeding or additional curing steps for the tissue matrix. With this laser-based 3D printing process, the San Francisco Medtech startup could essentially wipe out the waitlist for human organ transplants.
The company is supported by True Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage technology startups. They contributed a $1.8 million seed investment. Civilization Ventures, 415 Ventures, IndieBio and Angel Investors also support this Medtech startup, bringing their total investments to $1.92 million.
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Day Zero Diagnostics
Antibiotic resistance is a public health crisis that is poised to get a lot worse if Medical technology startups like Day Zero Diagnostics don’t step in. It currently takes 2 days or longer to diagnose antibiotic resistance, and when patients with a severe infection can die within hours, there is a crucial need for better technology. At the Harvard Life Lab, Dr. Doug Kwon and his team use technology to identify bacteria strains and antibiotic resistance profiles of bacterial infections within 5 hours.
The machine learning algorithm, Keynome™uses MicrohmDB™, a proprietary microbial resistance database that determines antibiotic resistance from genome data. This Medtech startup starts with the usual clinical samples typically sent to the microbiology lab. The DZD system isolates and augments bacterial DNA that enables next-generation sequencing without the need to wait for culture. A cloud-based analytics platform then analyzes the resulting genomes, which allows physicians to use the right antibiotic within hours rather than days.
DZD was founded in May 2016 and is currently in the developmental stage. They have raised a total of $3.5 million and are expecting to deliver their prototype in 2018. The MedTech startup has won a plethora of awards including MedTech Innovator’s 2017 Global Competition, Winner at 2017 Fueling the Growth Boston Pitch Competition, Winner of the 2016 Pilot Innovation Grant and many more.
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NeuSpera Medical
Neuromodulation therapies work to treat chronic diseases by controlling the nervous system. The technology developed by NeuSpera Medical is an innovative implantable device using electromagnetic waves to generate power. The body acts as a natural waveguide to focus that power (energy) to places where biochemical processes need to be triggered. The device is 100 times smaller than any other that is currently available on the market. The smaller design lowers implant procedure complexity, surgery time, complication probability and post-surgical pain.
This Medtech startup was founded in December 2013 by Alexander Yeh, with a new CEO just appointed in August 2017. They raised $8 million in 2016, were appointed one of the Hottest Medtech Startups of 2017 by Medical Design & Outsourcing and won Most Promising Startup at the NeuroTech Leaders Forum in 2016.
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Onkos Surgical
Onkos Surgical is an innovative new Medtech startup that focuses on surgical oncology. The company’s founders offer a vast technology portfolio showcasing 3D printing capabilities, limb restoration devices and biological solutions, among many other tools to help treat cancer patients. A surgical planning platform called uDesign Patient Solutions enables this suite of technologies.
This top Medtech startup also has additional technologies including the Eleos limb salvage system for the radical resection and replacement of the distal femur, proximal femur, proximal tibia or total femur, My3D Technologies that develops personalized implant, instrument and anatomic model designs to aid surgeons in operations and their GenVieTM Regenerative Biologics suite, which is a collection of biologic products with applications specific to musculoskeletal oncology and healing.
Onkos Surgical was founded in 2013 by world-class innovators Patrick Treacy, Antony Koblish and Adele Oliva. They saw the opportunity to set the agenda for innovation in surgical oncology and were successful in creating innovative Medtech equipment that greatly impacts surgical oncology patients. In April 2017 they announced their round of Series B funding, amounting to $17.6 million.
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BioLert
This new innovative healthcare startup provides epilepsy patients with a smartwatch that provides actionable seizure alerts. It also detects other vital information and notifies caregivers of potential neurological events. All data is automatically documented and saved to a cloud. This allows healthcare providers and medical research teams easy and permission-based access. BioLert’s goal is to develop better treatments for individual patients and the seizure disorder community as a whole.
Patients download an app and pay a subscription fee of $19.99 per month. The user must own either a Moto 360 2nd Generation watch or Moto 360 Sport, as well as an Android phone. The company states Apple’s current third-party developer restrictions create barriers to providing an iOS supported platform.
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Viome
At-home testing kits are revolutionizing healthcare and allowing patients to take well-being into their own hands. Viome is a perfect example of Medtech startups utilizing at-home testing kits and data analysis technology. Users can better understand their health through gut microbiome and take the proper steps to either maintain their wellbeing or find the right therapies to improve it.
Users get their results on an app after sending a stool sample. The data is displayed in an appealing report with charts and simple text breakdowns. The company also offers an analysis of the user’s metabolism with a nutritional-challenge shake and simple in-home measurements. The test can be purchased on the website for $399.
The team of leading entrepreneurs, scientists, and physicians developed the private company in 2016 to analyze and aggregate patient biological data. As the sample size grows, the company plans to unearth trends and influences that will unlock scientific breakthroughs. As of August 2017, Viome has raised $21 million, which will be used for further product development and expanding their R&D.
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Bionic Vision Technologies
Bionic Vision Technologies is a privately owned Australian Medtech startup that develops retinal devices to restore vision to people with retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. Their technologies provide clear and unique advantages over effective prostheses that work to increase a patient’s visual acuity.
The BVT device consists of a camera that attaches to a pair of glasses, an externally worn vision processing unit and an electrode array implanted behind the retina. According to their website, “the camera captures the image and transmits the data first to the vision processing unit and then to the electrode array.”
The technology was initially developed by Bionic Vision Australia in 2007 and Bionic Vision Technologies was founded in 2010 to market the product and complete the research. They are currently a MedTech Innovator Finalist.
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Green Sun Medical
For the 3% of the U.S. population that suffer from idiopathic scoliosis, it seems like the only option would be to forever live with uncomfortable, invasive therapies. For decades patients suffered, but Green Sun Medical’s tech-enabled spinal brace generates consistent corrective forces necessary to reverse spinal curvature. This innovative medical technology startup enables scoliosis sufferers to freely move and cure their condition.
Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis and Kyphosis sufferers have their spinal tissue remodeled the same way orthodontic braces straighten teeth. An iPad application sends real-time data back to the patient’s healthcare provider containing information about where the pressure is placed, as well as the outcome.
Green Sun Medical is an innovative Medtech startup founded in 2015. The company won the $200,000 top prize at the MedTech Innovator awards in 2016. They just won a $50,000 grant at the 2017 FDA-sponsored Pediatric Device Innovation Symposium. That money is being used for their pilot project happening in Spring 2018, where 30 patients will be monitored using Green Sun’s brace.
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Trayt
Trayt will revolutionize brain disorder healthcare for parents, patients, physicians, and therapists. Its goal is to help diagnose and treat those with autism, ADHD and other brain disorders using big data and analytics. This patient-centric data analytics Medtech startup creates a series of tools to measure the efficacy of all treatments, and engages the entire system of care. The app continuously tracks, measures and shares behavioral and medical outcomes.
Malekeh Amini collaborated with Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UC Riverside (California), Dr. Carl Feinstein. Together they formed Ava Health to better understand the symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders and provide personalized treatment plans.
Their app, Trayt, provides real-time access to patient outcomes data. This enables intervention, increasing clinical efficiency by 30%. The end goal is to predict how a single patient will react to a treatment before it is employed. The app is currently available as a pilot study to US volunteers on either an iOS or Android device. Trayt is quickly being recognized as an innovative leader among the main Medtech startups.
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Myonic Technologies
Myonic Technologies is an interesting addition to the last as the company is founded by high school students. Ben Saltz (CIO), Nate Peterson (CTO), Sam Everett (CFO), and Nick Titus (CEO) have created a wearable device for paralysis patients to regain muscle movement. They hope to launch the device by 2018 for around $200.
The device uses an Emotiv Epoc+ brain control interface (BCI) that is able to grant muscle contractions with minimal use of physical motion. The innovative Medtech device is controlled by nothing more than the user’s thoughts and simple head motions. The user trains the device to read thoughts in under 15 minutes. The device then attaches to an elastic sleeve containing embedded electrodes and sensors, allowing movement of the thumb, four fingers, and elbow.
They are currently a showcase company featured on Medtech Innovator.
Medtech Startups Offer Exciting Possibilities
The world of Medtech startups offers exciting and lucrative possibilities for patients, healthcare providers, researchers and IT developers. This list of top 20 Medtech startups features only a few in the sea of thousands who are aiming to improve healthcare quality and costs over time. Stay connected with BizVibe to learn about the latest medical device trends and news to remain ahead of the competition.
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