I-Corps: TAURUS: Enabling a Minimally Invasive Treatment for Urethral Strictures

尿道狭窄是指尿道纤维性狭窄，就像一条疤痕组织带，会导致排尿并发症，严重影响全球男性的生活质量。这种疾病包括尿频和疼痛，阴茎发炎，尿路感染风险增加，以及如果不及早治疗，肾功能衰竭等并发症。现有的治疗尿路狭窄患者的选择分为两类：有效但有创且复杂的开放手术(尿路成形术)，以及结果不佳的微创手术(扩张术、尿路切开术或自身导尿术)。患者通常从微创治疗开始，如扩张术或尿路切开术(拉伸或切割疤痕组织)，狭窄复发的可能性很高。患者经常选择重复这样的治疗，尽管他们的一线泌尿科医生的疗效很短，而不是接受由训练有素的重建泌尿科医生进行的外科手术。I-Corps团队uCure正在开发Taurus，这是一种使泌尿科医生能够通过复制尿路成形术的有效性和耐用性，以最小的侵入性恢复患者生活质量的系统。这旨在提供一种更理想的方法来减少患者的复发，并使范围广泛的泌尿科医生能够获得经济激励的治疗，从而为支付者和整个医疗系统带来成本效益。治愈？S金牛促进移植物经尿道输送，扩大狭窄处的尿路。拟议的项目正处于概念验证阶段，对早期可行性原型进行迭代，并在死后和活着的兔子身上进行工作台和初步动物试验。该团队不仅与潜在的用户进行了讨论，还与全球各地的泌尿科医生进行了讨论，这些医生大多在20世纪90年代尝试过经尿路成形术，但由于尝试过程的复杂性而未能获得采用。多渠道小腔制造和内窥镜的进步现在为开发可行的、可获得的、用户友好的设备以广泛商业采用打开了大门。通过i-Corps计划，拟议的项目受益于技术和临床风险降低，同时快速迭代解决方案设计。该团队目前正在与第三方制造资源讨论将其概念验证原型转化为阿尔法原型的规模，以便在其动物研究中使用。该团队计划在I-Corps计划结束时展示拟议的金牛座系统的早期功能原型。

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.