In light of the incessant healthcare talk and reform on the imminent horizon, we’ve lately had fun discovering tiny new companies that illustrate some of the under-the-radar efforts of the medical community that might help reduce the cost of what has become a behemoth. (Oh, Congress, are you listening?) This week, that company is Sentient Bioscience, a local startup that we actually came across as it was in the process of securing a round of seed funding from RI’s Slater Technology Fund.
Founded by two leading interventional radiologists and a professor of medical science and engineering in molecular pharmacology and biotechnology at Brown University, Sentient is developing technology for site-specific drug delivery and embolization therapy, a rapidly-growing market for cost-effective alternatives to surgery. Embolization is a minimally invasive procedure designed to prevent blood flow to a specific area of the body, usually in hopes of shrinking a tumor or blocking an aneurysm. As an endovascular alternative to surgery, it has benefited from the innovative efforts of the radiology specialty and is now entering a new phase of expansion, led by researchers looking for improvements in cost-effective therapies for cancer.
Sentient’s strategy aims to target therapy regionally within the body and improve site-specific drug delivery by not only blocking arteries supplying benign and cancerous growths, but also redirecting blood flow to deliver targeted drug therapy to these tumors.
Pretty smart, right? To be sure, there are still risks to embolization – even uterine fibroid embolization, which is used to treat mostly benign fibroid tumors of the uterus as an alternative to a hysterectomy – has its pros and cons. But administering therapy without surgery has the potential for quality of life improvements and cost savings that warrant a long look.
We’ll have to keep an eye on embolization research as the new healthcare approach crystallizes. No doubt these guys will have some role to play in the evolution to come.