NIH Awards Grant to Healionics for STARgraft Commercialization

Healionics Corporation has been awarded a $1.25 million Small Business Innovation Research grant by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to help commercialize its STARgraft vascular graft. The grant was provided under the National Institutes of Health Commercialization Readiness Pilot Program, which provides additional technical assistance and late-stage R&D support not typically covered within small business awards to help market products.
 
“We appreciate NHLBI’s recognition of STARgraft’s potential to provide more reliable vascular access for dialysis patients,” Healionics CEO Mike Connolly said. “These funds will help us complete testing, pursue regulatory clearance, and prepare for market launch.“
 
More than 550,000 people in the United States suffer from kidney failure and require frequent dialysis to filter waste from their blood. Current methods of creating and maintaining regular bloodstream access for dialysis are risky, unreliable and costly, driving a significant portion of the $50 billion the U.S. spends annually to treat kidney failure. A vascular graft (synthetic blood vessel) is often implanted to create an access site with sufficient flow rate for dialysis, but existing grafts frequently fail due to occlusion and/or infection. Healionics’ STARgraft vascular graft, based on proprietary synthetic biomaterial technology, is designed to resist both problems.

STARgraft leverages Healionics’ platform STAR (Sphere Templated Angiogenic Regeneration) biomaterial scaffold, which Healionics considers a breakthrough in biointegration and tissue regeneration. The biomaterial resulted from a sustained effort to discover the “sweet spot”, i.e., the exact pore size and structure that enables angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels) and healing while reducing foreign body response, minimizing tissue scarring, and imparting high resistance to infection.
 
Healionics is a privately held medical device company in Seattle that aims to improve the health, longevity, and quality of life of kidney failure patients, while reducing treatment cost.