Under the direction of CEO and Co-Founder Ilan Uchitel, CAPS Medical™ is pioneering new approaches to cancer treatment with its PlasmaSure™ technology, designed to offer effective tumor ablation while sparing healthy tissue.
CAPS Medical was founded with a specific mission: to address the unmet needs in cancer treatment by creating a technology that could selectively ablate tumors while preserving healthy tissue. This goal emerged from a collaboration between endoscopic surgeons and physicists who recognized the need for minimally invasive solutions that could reduce the damage often caused by traditional therapies. Uchitel explained, “The goal was to develop a solution that could treat a wide range of tumors throughout the body endoscopically to minimize the damage to healthy tissue and reduce the need for invasive surgeries and the associated side effects.”
The concept of using plasma to treat tumors endoscopically resulted from years of collaborative research between the Technion and Rambam Health Care Campus, two renowned academic institutions in Israel. Uchitel shared, “Following several years of successful research, we licensed the technology, eventually leading to the creation of CAPS Medical.”
Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death, claiming more than nine million lives every year. Uchitel emphasized the need for a more precise approach: “Existing cancer therapies usually damage the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. In many cases, this contributes to side effects and increased mortality.”
CAPS Medical aims to tackle this limitation within a vast oncology market. With non-muscle invasive bladder cancer as its first commercial indication, the company is addressing one of the most common and costly cancers. Uchitel noted, “It’s the sixth most common cancer in the world, with over 1.6 million patients suffering from the disease—and typically, it isn’t cured. It’s a systemic disease with extremely high recurrence rates. It’s the most expensive cancer to treat across the patient’s lifetime, with over 7.5 billion dollars in associated annual costs.”
The standard of care for bladder cancer has not seen significant advancements in decades. Uchitel explained, “The tumors are treated by resecting the tumor with a very traumatic process called transurethral resection of bladder tumor (TURBT), which is associated with high mortality and multiple side effects. The resection is then followed by a series of very troublesome intravesical installations of chemotherapy or immunotherapy.”
CAPS Medical’s breakthrough PlasmaSure technology uses non-thermal plasma, a stream of ionized gas at body temperature, to selectively destroy cancer cells. While commonly used in medicine and proven effective, existing large devices prevent them from being used inside the body.
Uchitel described the uniqueness of the technology: “Our breakthrough is the ability to generate a highly selective plasma at the tip of a small-diameter, flexible probe that can be inserted in working channels of existing minimally invasive tools. With this approach, we’re using a keyhole procedure to deliver the treatment directly to the tumor inside the body.”
CAPS Medical has achieved significant progress, with a clinical study demonstrating the efficacy and safety of its PlasmaSure technology for treating bladder cancer. Uchitel shared, “We completed a very successful clinical study, treating nearly 70 tumors endoscopically instead of resection. 85% of the tumors treated in the study were destroyed after a single treatment while completely preserving healthy tissue. There were no local recurrences after one year of follow-up.”
With FDA and CE clearance targeted for 2025, CAPS Medical is actively raising funds to support these regulatory efforts and prepare for market entry in the United States and Europe. “Our next step is to take the company through FDA and CE clearance, establish a presence in the United States, prepare for commercialization, and gather clinical data for additional indications,” Uchitel explained. Additionally, the company is pursuing strategic partnerships to broaden its technology’s applications into areas such as lung, esophageal, stomach, pancreas, and gastrointestinal cancers.
According to LSI’s Surgical Procedure Volumes database, there are projected to be 7.0 million therapeutic bladder procedures performed worldwide in 2024. For the 2023 to 2028 forecast period, therapeutic bladder procedures are projected to increase at a CAGR of 8.3%, reaching approximately 9.7 million procedures by 2028.
TURBT is the current standard of care for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, which is the most common (70-85% of all cases) form of diagnosed bladder cancer. Limitations of the TURBT, chiefly incomplete resection, lead to inferior patient outcomes. Given the more technical nature of the procedure, incomplete resection and other complications are a risk of the procedure.
Energy-based interventions have become increasingly popular for many surgical procedures because of their advantages over traditional surgical resections. As previously stated, technical challenges associated with surgical dissection make energy-based approaches appealing. A suitable comparison is the evolution of the surgical treatment of atrial fibrillation (AFib). Originally treated with the cut-and-sew Maze procedure, the surgical treatment of AFib has evolved to adopt selectively ablating parts of the myocardium with non-thermal energy. Introduced in just the past few years, major Medtech strategics believe non-thermal energy will be used in 40-65% of AFib procedures worldwide by 2026. There is a favorable outlook for companies like CAPS Medical looking to utilize non-thermal energy to improve the clinical outcomes for other difficult-to-treat procedures, like bladder cancer.
Uchitel has been selected to present at LSI USA ‘25 next March 17-21 in front of hundreds of global medical technology companies. Join us in welcoming Uchitel to the event in Dana Point, CA, where he will share the latest updates on CAPS Medical’s technology and development.
Schedule an exploratory call
Request Info© 2024 Life Science Intelligence, Inc., All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy
