Meet Perceptive Medical, the company revolutionizing patient care by automating blood pressure control during surgery and in the intensive care unit (ICU). Led by visionary founders Joseph Rinehart, M.D., and Maxime Cannesson, M.D., Ph.D., Perceptive Medical is transforming healthcare through automation.
Under Pressure
“This company grew out of looking at the literature about where there’s evidence about harm, but where our practice lags behind,” says Rinehart, an associate professor of anesthesiology and vice chair for research at UCI’s School of Medicine.
Rinehart and the Perceptive Medical team are currently developing a device, a closed-loop vasopressor system, that not only monitors a patient’s blood pressure but adjusts medication automatically. The analogy Rinehart likes to use to explain the need for his device is baking in an oven.
“If you wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies, you’d set your oven to 350 degrees and expect the temperature to remain there,” he explains. “But the current practice is as if we’re manually lighting a fire, blowing it out, and then watching a thermometer.”
In this analogy, Rinehart is trying to invent the automated oven.
Unleashing the Power of Automation
We already know that the duration and degree of a patient’s hypotension (low blood pressure) increases the likelihood of catastrophic events (such as a heart attack, stroke, kidney injury, or septic shock). We also know the time spent in hypotension is cumulative and results in bad outcomes. But studies show that even when medical providers are informed of their patients’ hypotension, the frequency and severity of these occurrences don’t decrease.
To put it simply, during surgery, an anesthesia provider is busy. They have multiple simultaneous care tasks involving medication, ventilation, fluid management, and tracking the progress of the procedure, and sustained attention to a non-cognitive task like adjusting a rate in response to blood pressure is not a human strong suit. It is, however, something that computer systems do very well, and that can both improve performance as well as free up the anesthesia provider for more high-level strategic tasks. Adjusting patients’ drug infusion rates is far from an anesthesiologist’s only task. Plus, human labor is expensive and inconsistent. And like anything that is manually maintained, there’s a potential for human error.
But what if a human didn’t have to adjust a patient’s medication? What if a machine without any competing duties could carry out this task and improve patient outcomes at the same time? Perceptive Medical’s early results have demonstrated that this is exactly what they’ve been able to do. Their prototype has significantly reduced the time a patient spends in hypotension during and after surgery. Their device leaves medical providers in control while freeing up their time.
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Pumping Innovation and Investor Confidence
Rinehart is no stranger to startups. He’s launched multiple companies as a faculty member from UCI and believes the university provides a strong framework for innovation.
“UCI has done a good job of growing the startup ecosystem,” Rinehart says. “What you receive is worth much more than what the university asks for in return. I’ve used many of the available resources and some of my time as a faculty member to build something. That’s pretty incredible. What other job can you do that?”
Another vital part of the startup ecosystem is funding. Procuring enough funding to get a startup up and running can feel a bit like a Catch-22. You must prove to investors that your technology has commercial promise, but in order to produce the evidence to convince them, you need money.
This is where UCI’s Proof of Product (PoP) grant, distributed through UCI Beall Applied Innovation plays a pivotal function in the early stages of a startup. Beall provides often hard-to-procure seed funding to propel start-ups past the idea stage. The PoP grants help de-risk commercially promising technology by showing “proof of product” for larger investors and granting agencies down the road.
Rinehart received a PoP grant for Perceptive Medical, as well as a UC Center for Accelerated Innovation grant. He used the funds to hire engineers to create the initial design for patent filing.
“The first thing investors want to know is whether you have a patent. UCI will pay for the filing of the patents, but you need funds to pay for the expertise to develop those patents. You can’t just submit a drawing on the back of a napkin,” Rinehart explains.
Last year was an especially stressful year financially for many in the startup world. According to Rinehart, fundraising has been Perceptive Medical’s biggest challenge so far. Fortunately, the Cove Fund, a seed-stage venture capital fund headquartered in “The Cove” at UCI Beall Applied Innovation came through as an anchor investor and helped Perceptive Medical get over this funding hump.
Unlocking Personalized Target Research
“Rinehart is aiming to start a clinical trial under FDA IDE approval next year with a commercial-ready system. (Class III is the highest risk category for devices approved by the FDA. Pacemakers and heart valves fall in this category.) The level of regulatory scrutiny Perceptive Medical will undergo will be intense. But through it all, Rinehart maintains his sense of humor.
“I think for my next company, I want to do something totally unregulated, like a holiday village. I could put some LEDs in a house and sell it. Maybe I’ll go with Halloween villages first. Halloween is way more fun than Christmas anyway,” he says.
Halloween villages aside, Rinehart hopes to collect data from his clinical study next year and later apply for FDA approval. Not only will he and the Perceptive Medical team make monumental strides with their closed-loop vasopressor, but the data they collect may have even larger implications for patient health. With the data Perceptive Medical’s device collects, they will be able to open the doors for creating personalized target research for blood pressure.
“We will be able to answer questions about what blood pressure is best for patients with a degree of certainty that hasn’t been possible before,” he says.
Discover More at: https://www.perceptivemedical.com/