The Chicago-based startup designed its minimally invasive system with a novel nitinol scaffold that perforates blood clots and infuses them with tissue plasminogen activator (TPA), a thrombolytic drug commonly referred to as a clot-buster.

Flow Medical recently offered Medical Design & Outsourcing our first good look at the prototype with some images that we're sharing here.

Flow Medical co-founder and CEO Jennifer Fried has so far declined to dive deep into the technology with us, but she and her team offered some details to us previously and have also commented publicly elsewhere. For example, Fried and co-founders Dr. Jonathan Paul and Dr. Osman Ahmed discussed the system and showed how it works in the video at the end of this post, which they submitted as a finalist for the MedTech Innovator accelerator's 2024 grand prize.

Here's what we know about the system based on our previous interviews with Fried and other information the company has shared in recent months.

After the catheter is all the way through the length of the clot, the sheath pulls back to reveal the scaffold. The adjustable catheter allows for different lengths of the scaffold to match the length of the clot.

The catheter also has a fiber-optic pulmonary artery pressure sensor for real-time hemodynamic monitoring. That's meant to help physicians determine how much of the clot-busting drug to administer and for how long.