Our History
Svelte Medical Systems, Inc. (Svelte) was founded in 2007 by Robert Fischell, ScD, David Fischell, PhD and Tim Fischell, MD with a mission to:
- improve stent deliverability
- reduce procedural time and costs
- improve patient outcomes
The Fischell family brings their tremendous knowledge of stent design and incredible entrepreneurial experience to Svelte. Collectively, they have over 200 patents associated with medical devices and have launched over a dozen medical related companies in the past two decades. Their vast experience and knowledge are key in developing products that will dramatically enhance the performance of stent delivery systems and significantly improve clinical results.
Additionally, expertise can be found abundantly beyond the founding family. Svelte’s management team has over ninety years of collective experience in bringing highly successful medical devices to the market in both entrepreneurial environments and large organizations. For example, Mark Pomeranz, Svelte’s President and CEO, was responsible for the product commercialization team that brought the Cypher stent to the market in his role as the Vice President of Product Development at Cordis Corporation, a Johnson & Johnson Company.
Svelte has created relationships with highly competent technology partners and has secured key intellectual property in the cardiovascular stent market.
Svelte Today
Svelte has developed the lowest profile and most deliverable balloon expandable stent in the market, along with technology to develop a non-inflammatory Drug Eluting Stent (DES). The company has initiated clinical trials in Europe and South America and anticipates market introduction of its bare metal stent, Svelte Acrobat in the European Union (EU) and Brazil by the middle of 2010 with a US launch in the second half of 2012.
The company has developed three distinct technologies that will allow Svelte to provide a unique value proposition in the stent marketplace as its devices are introduced into the cardiac catheterization lab:
Stent-on-a-wire
Svelte’s innovative “Stent-on-a-Wire” (SOAW) technology presents a more deliverable, very low profile system that navigates the arteries like a guidewire. This delivery system will allow the physician to eliminate a significant number of steps in a stenting procedure and offers significant time and cost savings on a per case basis.
Hybrid design
Svelte’s Hybrid Stent design combines the best of both thin and thick struts to create a configuration that is highly flexible and able to be crimped to a very low diameter on the Acrobat delivery system without compromising its ability to provide excellent vessel support or radiopacicity.
Non-inflamatory drug coating
Svelte is developing a Sirolimus eluting stent that has non-inflammatory properties, potentially making it less irritating to the vessel lining than stents with typical polymeric coatings. The Svelte DES is being developed to have the same drug release kinetics as the market leaders while potentially minimizing inflammation in the vessel to reduce the need for long term dual anti-platelet therapy.
