Clinical Need

A wound closure device as rapid to use as a skin stapler,
with the clinical advantages of meticulous sutures.

Over 230 million open surgical procedures are undertaken annually, each creating a wound requiring closure. The correct skin closure method is critical, it impacts clinical outcome and is ideally achieved with meticulous sutures. This is slow, taking up to 30minutes (which can increase mortality by 25% in certain patients). Reduced operating times can result in improved patient outcomes, cost savings, improved theatre efficiency and even reduced mortality. Surgical staples are commonly used as a fast alternative to sutures. However, they are known to have increased clinical complications and are considered archaic by many surgeons. A good alternative to staples does not yet exist and we have a simple and achievable solution to serve this clinical need.

Clinical Validation

Cyrus has a passionate interest in and first hand experience of this unmet need. To ensure that this was not simply a passion project a higher threshold was set to validate the need from a clinical perspective:

1. Clinician Interviews: Over 100 globally, showing unanimous support for the clinical need and concept.

2. A Systematic Literature Review (pending publication). 58 papers were analyzed and showed strong evidence that skin staples are associated with increased clinical complications (e.g. pain, infection and poorer cosmetics) compared with sutures.

The Market

The wound closure market was estimated at over $4 billion in 2014, grew to $6 billion by 2017. It continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.

Sutures and staples together represent over 50% of that market. These markets are dominated by large companies including Covidien (now Medtronic), Johnson and Johnson, and 3M. The target market for this device has been estimated by venture capitalists at approximately $1.1 billion and is continuously growing.