PSI Medical Catheter Care, winner of the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania Big Idea Business Plan contest announced last week, used the $100,000 prize almost immediately to begin implementing its winning business plan with the hiring of the company’s first employee, a general manager. News of the company’s success in the competition also added to the momentum of conversations with angel investors, said Dr. Anthony Colantonio, co-founder of PSI with Dr. Menno Jager.
Three investors came forth with proposed contracts for participating in the company’s initial capital round of $1.5 million, money that will be used to meet pre-market milestones, including final manufacturing, packaging, clearance with the Food and Drug Administration and clinical trials.
Meanwhile, as those pieces of the plan began to fall into place, the founders also were making arrangements to move from a location in Meadville to the Erie Technology Incubator space at Gannon University, where it will be the first biomedical enterprise in residence.
The first two products for which the company has applied for patent protection will offer hospital surgical suites and emergency rooms an easy-to-use system and a standardized routine for applying a custom-fitted, disinfecting shield designed to eliminate microbes that cause catheterization infections. According to Colantonio, such infections result in 30,000 deaths each year in the United States–a number comparable to annual U.S. auto fatalities–and add $2.4 billion to the costs of medical care.
“We hope to be hiring a CFO and support staff by January,” Colantonio says. “Then we are looking to create a sales force of four to six employees in 2010 and prepare for our first products to go into the market as of January 2011.”
With catheterization infection rates in some European countries even higher than in the United States, “we think this should be an international product,” he says.
Source: PSI Medical, Ben Franklin Partners, Anthony Colantonio
Writer: Joseph Plummer