Briteseed

Briteseed is developing SafeSnips, an affordable platform technology that seamlessly integrates diagnostic and imaging capabilities into surgical devices. With SafeSnips-enabled tools, surgeons will be notified before an unsafe cut into a blood vessel occurs.
Accidental vessel injury is a common and significant problem for patients and surgeons that occurs in one out of every thirty laparoscopic surgeries. For every accidental blood vessel injury, one in five patients will face the unfortunate possibility of life-threatening morbidity or even mortality. It costs U.S. hospitals an additional $210K due to non-reimbursable costs for each preventable incident. SafeSnips will improve surgeon outcome by providing a low-cost, real-time, and unobtrusive technology for vessel detection to address this need. SafeSnips-integrated surgical tools are differentiated from existing blood vessel detection systems in that they do not require any contrast agent or separate imaging system to identify a hidden blood vessel in real time.
Briteseed’s business model will focus on out-licensing a disposable sensor technology for a wide range of surgeries, while the specific market focus will be on vessel-sealing devices, which are the most widely used surgical cutting tool and comprise a $1.2B global market. Briteseed plans to commercialize the first product within two years, led by a well-qualified technical and business team and advisory board consisting of highly regarded clinicians, scientists, serial entrepreneurs, and early-stage investors with significant medical device experience. Further development of the SafeSnips platform technology will extend Briteseed’s product capabilities to real-time detection of other vessels (e.g., ureters, bile ducts, etc.) and tissues (e.g., cancer, etc.) during surgery.
Briteseed is seeking $3M to refine the current technology to a miniaturized prototype, conduct preclinical and pilot clinical studies at Northwestern Memorial hospital, implement an ISO 13485 quality system, submit U.S. and European regulatory applications, file for additional patent applications, and start to expand the SafeSnips platform for detection of additional tissues and integration into other surgical tools.