Sacramento Business Journal -- A former energy company executive in Sacramento hopes to break into the medical device market with a tiny, umbrella-like filter for stroke treatments.
The device, called SHELTER, fits the end of a catheter and is designed to collect blood clots and fat deposits dislodged during balloon angioplasty treatments in tiny blood vessels in the brain.
Vikram Janardhan started Insera Therapeutics LLC six months ago in Sacramento to develop Shelter and other stroke-treatment technologies.
The company is looking for $1.1 million in seed funding. It would use the money to develop five sizes of the prototype, which will fit into blood vessels from 2.5 millimeters to 5 millimeters wide.
The company will need to conduct clinical trials and apply to the Food and Drug Administration to bring the device to market. Janardhan said Insera will need to raise $16.8 million in three more funding rounds to complete the process.
A family affair
For years, Janardhan said, he had heard his brother Vallabh Janardhan, a neurologist at the University of Minnesota who specializes in strokes, talk about the need for stroke treatments. Catheter-based treatments for heart disease have become commonplace, but for strokes it is like “the early days of the Internet,” Vikram Janardhan said.
“Current solutions for stroke are just physical therapy,” he said. “They just work on very basic motor movements. It doesn’t come anywhere close to reversing the damage of this disease.”
Vikram Janardhan worked in Sacramento as president of the software division of Global Energy Decisions LLC. When the company sold to Ventyx Inc., he decided to start Insera and develop some of the technologies he and his brother talked about.
He brought in Gerald Voegele, a former Boston Scientific Inc. product designer, to head up Insera’s product prototype effort. Vikram Janardhan became chief executive officer of Insera, and Vallabh Janardhan was named chief medical officer.
“The company is headed by some really bright people,” said Reginald Low, chief of cardiovascular medicine and interventional cardiology at the UC Davis Heart Center. He serves on Insera’s scientific advisory board.
