image: Ángel Enríquez, CEO of Emboa Medical Inc., shows the company’s patent-pending catheter that mimics a snake’s teeth to improve outcomes for stroke patients. The TRAP design has demonstrated a 200% increase in blockage removal force compared to a traditional catheter.
Credit: (Purdue University photo/Vincent Walter)
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Emboa Medical Inc., a medical device startup, has mimicked a snake’s evolutionary advantage to improve the retrieval of blood clots that cause stroke.
The company has created a novel microstructured catheter that has been validated to improve outcomes for stroke patients. Its patent-pending platform, called TRAP, or thrombus retrieval aspiration platform, emulates a boa constrictor’s teeth arrangement in its biomimetic design to grab onto blood clots without tearing them.
CEO Ángel Enríquez of Emboa Medical said the TRAP design demonstrated a greater than 200% increase in blockage removal force compared to a traditional catheter.
“Additionally, the TRAP catheter showed significant benefits in removing clots on the first attempt in a worst-case neurovascular model,” he said. “It achieved a 40% success rate compared to 10% for conventional smooth inner diameter catheters.”
Emboa Medical was founded by clinical experts at Goodman Campbell Brain and Spine and NYU Langone Health and medical device researchers at Purdue University’s College of Engineering. TRAP was designed by Enríquez and Hyowon Lee, professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Center for Implantable Devices. They disclosed TRAP to the Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization, which submitted a patent application to protect the intellectual property. OTC also issued a license to Emboa Medical to commercialize the IP.
Next steps and company milestones
Enríquez said Emboa has been diligently working on finalizing the design of the microstructures through physiologically relevant models to further establish differentiation among current catheters in the market.
“We have conducted in vitro experiments that quantitatively demonstrate the advantages of TRAP catheters,” he said. “Additionally, we will conduct an in vivo porcine model study and preliminarily validate TRAP’s safety and effectiveness by end of Q1 2025. The successful completion of this animal model study will lead to more functional and robust TRAP devices that can facilitate the transition to larger-scale verification activities toward regulatory approval.”
Another step to bring TRAP to the marketplace is to establish a manufacturing process to integrate microscale structures into the distal tip of catheters.
Lee received funding from Purdue Innovates Incubator’s Trask Innovation Fund and the CTSI Medtech Incubator to conduct his research to develop TRAP.
Since its launch, Emboa Medical has been awarded more than $150,000 in nondilutive funding through winning pitch competitions such as Medtech Color, Purdue Innovates’ New Venture Challenge and Startup Prize: Focus on Health.
“Additionally, we are a Seedling award recipient for the National Institutes of Health’s Blueprint Medtech program,” Enríquez said. “We have received mentorship from medtech industry experts, a consultation with regulatory experts to establish a regulatory pathway and recently conducted an extensive market research study to validate the focus of our TRAP technology.”
Worldwide impact of stroke
Stroke is the second-leading cause of death worldwide; it kills about 140,000 Americans annually. Almost 90% of stroke cases are caused by an obstruction of one of the arteries that supply blood to the brain, known as an ischemic stroke.
Enríquez said stroke is an extremely time-sensitive condition that requires swift therapy for a patient’s full functional recovery.
“The use of traditional stent retrievers results in higher rates of perforation due to the metal struts interacting with the vessel walls. This causes intracranial hemorrhages at a higher rate than aspiration catheters, which apply suction through a tube. This can be asymptomatic or symptomatic, but the truth is no doctor is comfortable causing damage to a patient’s blood vessels,” Enriquez said.
“Thus, aspiration catheters are an attractive tool because they achieve reported faster reperfusion times, lower rates of distal emboli (13.2% vs. 3.4%) and vessel injury (9.3% vs. 1.8%) at lower costs. Yet the aspiration force is dramatically decreased and limited by the smaller vessel diameter. TRAP was designed to address this obstacle.”
About Emboa Medical
Emboa Medical has developed a novel blood clot extraction device to address the prevalent issue of stroke, which is the second leading cause of death in the world. Using nature-inspired design, Emboa Medical has developed a novel tool that increases blood clot extraction forces regardless of catheter size.
Learn more or connect with the team by visiting the Emboa Medical website. The team is particularly excited to connect with mentors or people with regulatory and commercialization experience in the Interventional Radiology field.
About Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization
The Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization operates one of the most comprehensive technology transfer programs among leading research universities in the U.S. Services provided by this office support the economic development initiatives of Purdue University and benefit the university’s academic activities through commercializing, licensing and protecting Purdue intellectual property. In fiscal year 2024, the office reported 145 deals finalized with 224 technologies signed, 466 invention disclosures received, and 290 U.S. and international patents received. The office is managed by the Purdue Research Foundation, a private, nonprofit foundation created to advance the mission of Purdue University. Contact otcip@prf.org for more information.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 107,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 58,000 at our main campus in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its comprehensive urban expansion, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.