Medical Tubing and Extrusion

Medical tubing and extrusion technologies

First Look: Flow Medical’s next-generation thrombolysis catheter for pulmonary embolism

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An illustration showing Flow Medical's novel delivery scaffold and its hollow nitinol tubing.
Flow Medical’s novel delivery scaffold uses hollow nitinol tubing to deliver clot-busting drugs. [Image courtesy of Flow Medical]
Flow Medical is developing a thrombolysis catheter to improve the treatment of blood clots in pulmonary embolism patients.

The Chicago-based startup designed its minimally invasive system with a novel nitinol scaffold that perforates blood clots and infuses them with tissue plasminogen activator (TPA), a thrombolytic drug commonly referred to as a clot-buster.

Flow Medical recently offered Medical Design & Outsourcing our first good look at the prototype with some images that we’re sharing here.

“We wanted to build a device where you can perform pulmonary angiograms through the device with a scaffold that would expand into the clot and deliver thrombolytic drugs. That’s a lot of things to try and do in a relatively small-profile device,” Flow Medical co-founder and CEO Jennifer Fried said in an interview. . 

Flow Medical is now starting verification and validation (V&V) testing, supported by a $5 million seed round the company just closed.

Go to Medical Design & Outsourcing to learn more about the system, and see new images depicting the prototype and watch a video showing how its designed to work.

About Jim Hammerand

Jim Hammerand is the managing editor of Medical Design & Outsourcing. He has more than 15 years of professional journalism experience spanning newspapers, magazines, websites and broadcast news. For nearly a decade, he reported and edited business news for American City Business Journals as a reporter and digital editor at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal and then managing editor of the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota. He is based near Seattle in Edmonds, Washington, where he and his family live. Connect with him on LinkedIn or by email at jimhammerand@wtwhmedia.com.