HistoSonics, Inc. has just received $11 million from Y-M inventors to create a medical device to treat prostate disease. HistoSonics, Inc. is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is the brainchild of Charles Cain, Tim Hall, Dr. William Roberts, Brian Fowlkes, and Zhen Xu, all from UM.
This machine will use tightly focused ultrasound pulses to treat prostate disease. This new histotripsy technology is noninvasive and has an image-guiding system that obliterates tissues with a precision that exceeds a human’s ability. What makes this new process even more spectacular is that it uses cavitation, which is the production of tiny energetic bubbles to create a surgical scalpel that will liquefy tissue without the use of heat. Most ultrasound machines today use heat.
When the team members first thought about using cavitation technology, they were told it should be avoided, but no one would say why. Many industry experts didn’t think it would work. This just made the researchers more interested in learning about cavitation, and they studied it to see if it was possible to use it for noninvasive surgery. Turns out that it works! And it works very well!
The first uses for this new machine will be for the treatment of benign Prostatic Hyperplasia, also known as BPH. This is a non-cancerous condition that affects more than two million men in the U.S. alone. Surgery is the most common treatment for this condition, with over 400,000 BPH patients having surgery each year.
Going forward, HistoSonics is going to be a huge advancement in noninvasive surgical treatments, especially for treating BPH. Its developers are also excited about the possibility of treating other types of tumors in the future. With the great team of researchers and investors, this grand project will make it to completion and will change the world.