ARTICLE SUMMARY:
In the competitive arena of hemostatic devices, Cresilon’s nontraditional path to market may grant the start-up an edge over the competition. A first clinical validation of CHG, a gel product that stops bleeding in record time, in the animal health market, provides early proof-of-principle and early revenues.
Joe Landolina, co-founder and CEO of Cresilon, didn’t have to look far to find inspiration in organic chemistry. Living on a vineyard with a laboratory maintained by his grandfather, an employee of the pharmaceutical company Hoffman-La Roche, Landolina was encouraged to experiment from a young age. At 14, while attending a summer research program in tissue engineering at Columbia University, Landolina learned about the potential of decellularized plant-based scaffolding for differentiating stem cells into target tissue. From there, the young scientist worked on regenerating cartilage and synthesizing tissues in his home lab, discovering a blend of two biopolymers extracted from algae that “if nothing else, would stick to skin and wouldn’t let go until you wanted it to,” Landolina says.
As he worked with this biopolymer blend further, Landolina hypothesized that, if the material could be injected into a bleeding wound, it might grant the patient critical time to move to the next level of care without bleeding out. At this point, Landolina was earning his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at New York University, and when he entered the idea for a wound care product into a student business plan competition, it took first place in the engineering school and second place in the business school where future co-founder Isaac Miller was studying. That milestone provided just enough cash and recognition to start growing the concept into a company, the first venture of which would be Vetigel, a full-indication surgical hemostatic for the commercial veterinary market.
