Allotrope: Stimulating the Ureter to Streamline Surgery
Kayleen Brown
Managing Editor, DeviceTalks ? Podcast Host ? Journalist ? Speaker & Moderator #MedTech #HealthTech #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #podcasts #MedicalDevices #WomeninMedTech
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Meet Albert Huang, MD. Albert is Founder and CEO of Allotrope Medical Inc., a Houston-based Y-Combinator and venture-backed emerging medical device company born out of Texas Medical Center’s accelerator program, TMCx. Allotrope intends to advance surgical precision using safe electrical stimulation, potentially presenting a paradigm shift in ureter identification and protection during surgery.
Our body has natural movements of digestion, the urinary tract moves urine from the kidney to the bladder with muscular movements that we personally don’t control, but your body does. What we’ve figured out is a way to give the physician control over those movements using specific electrical signals that in many ways mimics the body’s nervous system.
-Albert Huang, Founder & CEO, Allotrope Medical
According to Allotrope, over three million abdominal and pelvic surgical procedures are performed in the US each year. Of these, accidental injury to the ureter, the tube that carries urine from the kidney to the urinary bladder, has resulted in a $3.2 billion burden to the healthcare system. Not to mention the negative impact these injuries have on the patients themselves.