In Profile: Thomas Muehlbauer, CEO, founder, Avacen Medical
Thomas Muehlbauer talks to MPN about Avacen Medical and Advanced Vascular Circulation Enhancement
Who are you and what do you do?
I am Thomas Muehlbauer, CEO and the founder of Avacen Medical. The concept for Avacen, which is an acronym for Advanced Vascular Circulation Enhancement, grew out of doing research on relieving migraine pain.
How would you sum up your company?
We are a single product company. Our patented US FDA-cleared medical device was designed to help the billions of chronic pain suffers in the world. The Avacen 100 medical device is a non-invasive medical device that is designed to allow consumers and patients to systemically treat chronic pain from a single convenient body location (the palm).
Simply place your hand into the Avacen 100 for a comfortable treatment session. The system uses heat therapy and negative pressure to increase local circulation and infuse heat into a vascular network, located in the palm of the hand. Raising the blood temperature at this ‘single point treatment’ (the palm) increases blood temperature throughout the body naturally via the circulatory system. This can benefit the entire body. Although it’s more complicated than this we basically provide the healthy benefits of a sauna from the inside out.
Name a business achievement you are most proud of.
That’s a tough question because we have achieved so much in the last four years!
Designing a safe (almost 500,000 treatments without a negative side effect), easy to use medical device that can help so many people has to be at the top of the list.
Our fibromyalgia clinical study which produced results showing a significant reduction in widespread pain for sufferers, who have very few options, has lead us down a very difficult path in getting regulatory approval. I’m very proud that we haven’t given up on getting marketing approval, especially when funding dried up more than once. Then we made it through FDA clearance.
And finally, over the last two years the company has been awarded three US and multiple international patents for our apparatus and methods that support the medical process called The Avacen Treatment Method (ATM). ATM provides whole-body muscular relaxation by rapidly and non-invasively infusing heat into the circulatory system to increase microvascular circulation, reduce blood viscosity and enhance deep tissue nutrition. The patents also cover multiple therapeutic uses to alleviate symptoms associated circulatory, neurological, lymphatic or endocrinal dysfunction.
What excites you about this industry
Medical devices that can reduce or eliminate pain associated with diseases that are now only treated by dangerous drugs is a very exciting prospect.
The fact that we have actually been able to relieve chronic pain resulting from numerous diseases for people who have tried everything possible is also very exciting.
Recently we have discovered that our product significantly reduces, and sometimes eliminates, the pain associated with CRPS, a disease that charts higher than giving birth on the pain intensity scale. Even though the path will be long and extensive to obtain regulatory approval, it is exciting to think that this segment of the population will at some point be able to escape the terrible drugs and expensive and extensive treatment regimes.
Where do you predict industry growth will come from over the next 12 months?
Healthcare in the US is under pressure to reduce costs and the use of opioids. Devices that offer a solution to these issues will experience exceptional growth.
Which medical plastic device do you wish you had invented and why?
To be honest, there is no other medical device that I wish would have invented. The Avacen Treatment Method will change the future of palliative care worldwide. The dream that billions of people will someday use our product is hard to top.