Vascular-delivery irreversible electroporation system for
This technology uses a patient's own blood vessels as electrical wires to destroy tumors deep inside organs without surgery. By inserting electrodes into an artery and a vein near the target tissue, physicians can deliver precisely controlled electrical pulses through the bloodstream that kill cancer cells using irreversible electroporation — essentially rupturing cell membranes — without generating damaging heat. The same underlying approach can also be applied outside the body to strip all living cells from donor organs while leaving the structural scaffold and blood vessel network intact, producing a clean biological framework ready to be repopulated with a patient's own cells for transplantation.
What you could build
A catheter-based ablation system for interventional oncology that treats inoperable liver, kidney, or pancreatic tumors minimally invasively; primary buyers would be hospital interventional radiology and oncology departments. A secondary product is an ex-vivo organ decellularization platform sold to tissue engineering labs and organ biobank companies.
Who in Virginia should care
Virginia's academic medical centers (VCU Health, Inova, UVA Health) and the medical device corridor around Northern Virginia and the I-64 biotech cluster would be natural commercial and clinical trial partners.
Readiness: Lab validated
Concept — described but not yet demonstrated. Lab validated — supported by experimental results in the patent. Prototype likely — the text describes a built, working embodiment.
Readiness is inferred from the patent text, not from a lab visit.
The record
- Inventors
- Michael B. Sano, Rafael V. Davalos, John L. Robertson, Paulo A. Garcia, Robert E. Neal
- Granted
- January 16, 2018
- Status
- Granted patent
- Patent number
- 9867652
Ready to talk?
Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties handles licensing for this technology.
Prosim summaries are generated from public patent text and are not legal advice.