From left: MedCity News Editor in Chief Arundhati Parmar, Odin Technologies CEO Steven Hansen, and MHIN President Dennis Depenbusch
Steven Hansen said the inspiration to start Odin Technologies came when he was practicing sports medicine. An athlete came in with compartment syndrome – a condition that results from physical injuries when pressure builds up inside the muscles, depriving muscle and nerve cells of blood flow – and he realized there was no good means of gathering information about the condition. It was a particularly stressful situation, as it meant either having to cut into the patient’s leg or waiting until the condition worsened.
“I may have to cut into your leg, which could end your career, or wait until it gets worse, which will end your career,” Hansen said in a phone interview, recalling the stress of the situation. That was when he and his colleagues sought to find a better way to diagnose compartment syndrome, which often affects athletes, members of the military and others.
Odin, with its Valkyrie device, was one of the winners of the Pitch Perfect contest at the MedCity INVEST conference in Chicago last week, winning the diagnostics track. The company, based in Chicago, grew out of Northwestern University.
According to the company’s website, the current practice is an intrusive system whereby patients are stuck with a 16-gauge needle to test pressure, which nevertheless provides an inaccurate and only partial snapshot of the patient’s pressure. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, estimates that of the emergency fasciotomies performed on patients, 85 percent are unnecessary.
In response, Hansen and his team looked at about 11 different technologies that could yield a better – and noninvasive – way to monitor compartment syndrome, including ultrasound, Doppler and measuring temperature or muscle conduction. In the end, they settled on optics, and in particular near-infrared spectroscopy and pulse oximetry. “We’re able to develop a technology that’s been around for quite some years, so it’s very well-understood in the medical population,” Hansen said. It’s also relatively inexpensive and enables the creation of a device that’s disposable. But while the underlying technology has been around for a long time, it’s recent developments in the field of wearables and artificial intelligence that have enabled Odin to do what would not have been possible even 10 years ago, he added.
On the financial side, Hansen said Odin is in the process of raising a $600,000 seed round, with $50,000 currently committed. It opened in January, and the company hopes to close it by the end of next month.
The technology is currently in the preclinical stages, having been tested on rats. But if it works on humans, Hansen said, physicians have remarked that it could become the standard of care for all vascular injuries. The company hopes to begin testing Valkyrie on humans toward the end of this year or early next year. Ben Taub Hospital in Houston – home to a major trauma center – will likely be a trial site, though it hasn’t formally committed yet, he said.
If it works, Odin will be able to tap into a market that includes more than 30 million extremity injuries every year, with a value of about $10 billion. It also hopes to get into areas like obesity, diabetes and peripheral artery disease.
Photo: Getty Images
