i-SEP innovates in autotransfusion

Article published in DM Mag

Nantes Medtech has just obtained more than €3 million in institutional support to develop its technology.

i-SEP’s autotransfusion technology enables blood to be recovered in the intraoperative phase.
Funded as part of the PIA Investing-for-the-Future Program, i-SEP will be able to call on €3.5 million in grants and repayable advances from a combination of PIA and the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund).

“We will be able to finalize the development of our innovative autotransfusion technology and overcome the clinical barriers to commercialization” said Sylvain Picot, Chairman of I-SEP.

Every year in France, there are 300,000 surgical interventions involving autotransfusion. But, as Sylvain Picot notes, blood washing by centrifugation “has the major disadvantage of excluding the platelets required for clotting”. His start-up is developing a filtration process capable of recovering blood in the intraoperative phase.

The new i-SEP technology, patented in thirteen countries, is the fruit of eight years of research on tangential filtration by Dr Francis Gadrat, an anesthetist at Bordeaux University Hospital. This membrane-separation method is an alternative to centrifugation.

A market worth €300 million

The twelve engineers, biologists and biochemists that comprise the i-SEP workforce joined forces with the anesthesia-reanimation departments at the Nantes, Bordeaux and Rennes University Hospitals, as well as with the French National Blood Bank (EFS). The Nantes-based start-up first validated the Proof Of Concept in 2016, then carried out technical tests on a test bench in the laboratory, and conducted animal tests two years ago.

“These 3.5 million euro allow us to take another step forward” notes Sylvain Picot.

i-SEP will be able to start clinical trials during the second half of 2019 with the aim of obtaining CE marking by 2020-2021. The targeted autotransfusion market is worth €300 million.