A urethral stricture is a fibrotic narrowing of the urethra, which is like a band of scar tissue, which leads to voiding complications, drastically affecting the quality of life for men across the globe. This disease includes symptoms such as frequent and painful urination, penile inflammation, increased risk of urinary tract infection, and complications such as renal failure if not treated early enough. Existing options for patients with urethral strictures fall into two buckets: effective but invasive and complex open surgery (urethroplasty), and minimally invasive procedures (dilation, urethrotomy, or self-catheterization) with subpar outcomes. Patients typically begin with a minimally invasive treatment such as dilation or urethrotomy (stretching or cutting of the scar tissue), with a high chance of stricture recurrence. Patients often choose to repeat such treatments despite the short duration of effectiveness with their frontline urologist, rather than undergo the surgical procedure, which is performed by a trained reconstructive urologist. This I-Corps team, uCure, is developing TAURUS, a system to empower urologists to restore patient quality of life by replicating effectiveness and durability of urethroplasty, minimally invasively. This aims to offer a more desirable approach to reduce recurrences for patients, and making a financially incentivized treatment accessible to a wide range of urologists, resulting in cost effectiveness to payers and the health care system as a whole.
uCure?s TAURUS facilitates the transurethral delivery of a graft, to widen the urethra at the site of stricture. The proposed project is in the proof of concept stage, iterating on early feasibility prototypes, and performing bench and preliminary animal tests in both post-mortem and live rabbits. This team has had discussions both with potential users, but also urologists across the globe who have attempted transurethral urethroplasty, mostly in the 1990s, but failed to gain adoption due to the complexity of the attempted procedures. Advances in multi-channel small lumen manufacturing and endoscopes now open the door to developing feasible, accessible, user-friendly devices for widespread commercial adoption. Through the I-Corps program, the proposed project benefits from technical and clinical de-risking, while swiftly iterating on solution design. The team is currently in discussion with 3rd party manufacturing resources to transform its proof of concept prototypes into alpha prototypes at scale for use in its animal studies. The team is planning to demonstrate early stage functional prototypes of the proposed TAURUS system at the end of the I-Corps program.
