Med Tech Firm Pivots, Selected to Showcase Innovation

INDIANAPOLIS – An Indianapolis startup is the only Hoosier company to earn a spot in a prestigious accelerator program for medical device companies. FAST BioMedical is developing tools to help patients facing heart or renal failure. More than 1,000 startups from around the world applied, and the Indiana company is one of a select few chosen for MedTech Innovator’s 2021 Top 50 Showcase.

In an interview with Business of Health reporter Kylie Veleta, FAST BioMedical Chief Executive Officer Joe Muldoon said the visibility is significant for the late-clinical stage med tech startup. “They really try and pick out the best of the best companies that are going to have the biggest potential impact on health care,” said Muldoon. “When you get brought into the fold, you get access to a lot of partners to work with in the space, which has been really helpful.”

Muldoon says the company is working to transform patient care through innovation. FAST BioMedical’s technology measures blood volume and kidney function.  “There are a lot of clinical applications,” explained Muldoon. “But the sweet spot is heart failure patients that come in volume overloaded, yet there is no way to measure their volume.”

Muldoon says the company was wrapping up an important clinical trial in 2019 in Germany, which generated an abundance of data. He says the hope was to get published in medical trade journals and attend conferences to get the product noticed. But then the pandemic struck. “We couldn’t get a publication written because the doctors that managed the trial were working double shifts, treating COVID patients. The heart failure conferences were either canceled or postponed,” said Muldoon.

He says the company took a hard pivot and used the time to build a fleet of the devices, which can be deployed to hospitals that are conducting their own clinical trials.

The company has also opened a new lab at 16 Tech Innovation District on the near westside of downtown Indianapolis. “The timing couldn’t have been perfect. We did get back in the clinic, the end of 2020. And for the first time, we were able to use our next generation device, run all the samples and do all the work internally.”

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