Minos Medical Launches The MEGACHANNEL

Irvine, CA - Minos Medical Inc. announced recently that it has launched its first commercial product for NOTES procedures, the MEGACHANNEL device for colonic access. The first in its platform of products for enabling natural orifice therapies. NOTES (or natural orifice surgery) involves snaking long flexible instruments through natural orifices such as the mouth or anus, to avoid skin incisions when performing surgery. One of the first barriers to NOTES procedures is gaining access to body cavities so that other functional instruments can be delivered to perform the actual therapy.

Minos Medical is developing a range of devices and therapies in the rapidly emerging field of NOTES and natural orifice surgery. Today they announced the launch of their first "Notes Tools" platform products - the MEGACHANNEL colonic access device. This product delivers a 20mm mega working channel along the length of the colon, allowing instruments up to 20mm in diameter to be delivered rapidly to the area of the bowel where the procedure is to be performed.

The device has been developed in collaboration with the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, and was extensively tested to ensure consistent access to the right colon up to the cecum. Access to the right colon has always been considered a challenge, but once in place, the MEGACHANNEL allows instrument exchange to the right colon in a matter of seconds. The company has clinically demonstrated consistent access to the cecum. It is now being trialled for right colon sessile polyp removal, where the scope often needs to be inserted and removed multiple times.

Professor Christoph Gasche, Medical University of Vienna and medical director for Minos Medical said, "The MEGACHANNEL is a major innovation towards the endoscopic access and rapid exchange of instrumentation for performing a variety of minimal invasive procedures in the colon."

The device is the company's first product and is a platform for their more advanced therapies such as APPENDOECTOMY which will use a variant of the MEGACHANNEL to gain access to the cecum, then invert and ligate the appendix.

"This product is a key platform for some of our technologies," said Brad Sharp, CEO of Minos Medical. "We believe it will get people used to using colonic access devices whilst performing simple procedures such as polyp removal, thus making the jump to more advanced procedures easier as we introduce those technologies."

Large sessile polyps of the right colon are estimated to represent over 1 million procedures worldwide and the MEGACHANNEL is thought to be valuable in up to a third of those procedures, by reducing the time required to remove and reinsert the scope to remove the re-sected pieces of polyp. The MEGACHANNEL has CE mark.

SOURCE: Minos Medical Inc.