Where there is surgery, there is blood. Every day, surgeons use electrocautery pencils to open incisions and dissect tissue in countless surgeries. However, cutting an organ inevitably causes blood to pool in the wound, obscuring the surgeon’s view and aspirating blood, which delays the operation.
Alex Yang at SB ’17 is looking to streamline that process with a new device that features both an electrocautery pencil and a suction tube. He founded his ClearCut Surgical earlier this year to manufacture the device, and his company has secured pre-seed funding from multiple investors.
“Our ultimate goal is to try to get this device into the hands of every surgeon in the world, because it will be used in every surgery.” Harvard Business School (HBS) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) in collaboration.
Yang first devised the ClearCut device as an undergraduate student in bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He spent the summer after his junior year working at his Innovation Digital Health Accelerator at Boston Children’s Hospital. There he met Heung Bae Kim, Professor of Surgery at HMS and his Weitzman Family Chair of Surgical Innovation at Boston Children’s Hospital. Kim and Yang started chatting and the issue of blood accumulation during surgery eventually surfaced.
“This is not a new problem,” Yang says. “Many surgeons have been grappling with this problem for decades. It inspired me.”
Out of these conversations, ClearCut was born. The handheld device uses a button to switch between an electrosurgical pencil and a suction tube. The injection-molded plastic device requires no additional power and switches functions with a pneumatic piston that connects to the vacuum suction on the walls of the operating room. These innovations could keep costs low and make the device accessible to hospitals in resource-poor regions of the world.
“This device has probably gone through over 100 iterations and 3D printed designs,” Yang says. “Naturally, surgeons are picky, and it really only takes one shot to get it right. If you feel awkward or something, you lose a surgeon on the spot.It was 80% to 90% for a while, but I wanted to make sure it was 100%.”
Over the past six years, Yang has been slowly developing the device while pursuing his MD/MBA, soliciting feedback from multiple surgeons within Boston Children’s Hospital. He founded the company in his March and soon after he won $30,000 as both second place and Crowd Favorite in the HBS New Venture Challenge. Most recently, ClearCut Surgical was named one of his 50 startups in his MedTech Innovator and Accelerator Challenge, which will announce prizes in October.
“They are the largest medical technology accelerator in the world,” Yang says. “It is very difficult to find a cohort that is so focused and has so many resources. Capital, manufacturing partners, industry partners all in one place he has access to.”
Designing devices is nothing new for Yang. His senior his capstone project, Pediatric Lower Limb Prosthetic Orthotics, won his Dean’s Award for Outstanding Engineering Project in 2017.
“My father is an architectural model maker and has spent his life building miniature buildings,” Yang says. “Since I was five or six. I was playing with tools in his workshop and he definitely inspired me.”
ClearCut still needs to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, a process that will likely take at least another year, Yang said. He aims for the company’s first commercial deployment in early 2025.
When ClearCut becomes available, Yang believes it will be a hit with surgeons around the world due to its low cost and ability to solve common surgical challenges like this.
“One option was to take an idea, apply for a patent, and then license or sell it to a large medical device company,” says Yang. “But given my experience at SEAS and my engineering know-how, I thought it would be better to spend my time and money and do as much as I could myself.”
