ARTICLE SUMMARY:
SonoVascular is developing a venous thrombectomy platform that offers versatility in a single platform that’s a total solution for DVT and PE. In operating by multiple modalities and mechanisms of action, the company’s founder believes the SonoVascular platform will offer single-session clot removal that is atraumatic, as seen in its preclinical work so far.
Daniel Estay was born into the medical device industry. His father, who is from Chile, had a medical device distribution business in Latin America. After college Estay joined the family business, representing and developing the Latin American businesses for Boston Scientific, St. Jude Medical, and others. He later joined the business development group at Johnson & Johnson, where he worked on the deals that created Cypher, the world’s first drug-eluting stent, following that up with an 11-year stint at Abbott, where he was the VP of Asia and Pacific for Abbott Vascular. After a long career, he and his wife moved to North Carolina to be closer to family on the East Coast.
But Estay wasn’t ready to retire. Keeping active in medtech, he started a strategic advisory firm for medical device companies, and he served as a mentor-in-residence at Duke University’s Office for Translation and Commercialization.
That’s how in 2017 he came to found SonoVascular in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “I was reading one of the vascular journals and came across an abstract about this technology. It happened to be from a university right down the street, so I reached out to one of the authors and contacted the tech transfer department,” Estay recalls. In Chapel Hill, he also met William Starling, the CEO and co-founder of the device incubator Synecor, who joined SonoVascular as chairman. Starling has a long and deep career in leading medical device companies.
