TheraNova, LLC, a medical device development company creating practical medical solutions, announces the development of a minimally invasive Canary™ Catheter sepsis detection and treatment technology.
The advanced monitoring technology in this revolutionary new catheter has the potential to save lives by providing early warning detection of impending sepsis and the prevention of fluid overload during the treatment of septic patients; both potentially fatal if diagnosis is delayed. 
In the U.S. alone there are 750,000 cases of sepsis each year, which account for 215,000 deaths annually. Combine this with $16.7 billion spent each year to treat sepsis cases, the Canary™ Catheter not only saves lives but has the potential to save billions in healthcare costs.
The Canary™ Catheter is capable of continuously monitoring intra-abdominal pressure, relative stroke volume, core body temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate and urine output through the advent of powerful sensors. The combination of increased sensitivity with improvements in processor speed allow for rapid acquisition of large amounts of data; taking advantage of unique frequency domains to inherently separate them from a single data stream. This non-invasive catheter utilizes the urine drainage catheter found in all ICU patients to extract valuable clinical data; eliminating the need for additional body access.
The manual acquisition and review of data combined with system integration challenges are the leading causes for diagnosis delays. These contribute to significant delays in the diagnosis of sepsis in ICU patients where every hour delay results in a 7% increase in mortality. The Canary™ Catheter eliminates these delays by integrating all manual data acquisition into one device, allowing continuous trending of these variables and optimization of diagnosis and treatment. Analyzing all data is a machine-learning enabled algorithm capable of reporting trends that would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the human eye to see.
“As a company, our focus is the development of medical devices that provide innovative solutions for unmet needs. We recognized a void in today’s medical device technology that represents an opportunity to save hundreds of thousands of lives,” said Dr. Daniel Burnett, president and CEO of TheraNova. “Although it wasn’t our first objective, this device also has the potential to save billions of dollars in the treatment of sepsis annually, but product adoption will be the determining factor in just how big of an impact we can make.”
The Canary™ Catheter is part of Consano Medical, the most recent spin-out from TheraNova, a medical device incubator responsible for the creation of seven spin-out companies; each focused on a wide gamut of clinical needs: BARAnova, Sequana Medical, Velomedix, EMKinetics, Channel Medsystems, Potero Medical and Consano Medical. Consano expects FDA 510(k) clearance and subsequent launch of its Canary Catheter in late 2015.
TheraNova is currently working on several additional technologies, including a non-invasive congestive heart failure diagnostic, a more effective chest tube/wound drain, a closed loop enteral feeding system, an artificial pancreas, a device to increase bone density in patients with osteoporosis and two medical apps.
For more information about TheraNova or any of the company spin-outs, please contact:
Jeff Lawrence, 617-633-5141, jeff.lawrence@sleekmachine.com.
