Wound care startup Medtric Biotech has developed what it says is a medical breakthrough for dressings: a bandage that both heals a wound and fights off infection.
The company’s current slate of products on the market do one or the other, but they don’t do both.
With the dual purpose product, the company won the Wake Forest University Schools of Business annual elevator pitch competition.
Thirty-five teams from around the world converged on Branch Banking & Trust Co. headquarters in Winston-Salem, N.C. for the March 26 competition. The competition’s judge’s found Medtric to be the best of the lot, and the company won the top $20,000 prize in the traditional track. It is now automatically entered in the Venture Labs Investment Competition, which could yield up to $500,000 in investment from the Piedmont Angel Network.
In the Wake Forest Elevator Competition, companies need to make the case for their technology in a two-minute elevator pitch.
Medtric’s wound dressing is called Osmose. The bandage has two active ingredients that kill bacteria by dehydrating it — a different approach from anything else on the market and the bonus for the bandage is that it’s also cheap, according to business development VP Rob Einterz. He said that the underlying materials for the bandage cost only 3 cents
So far, Medtric has done preclinical testing on guinea pigs. The company has tested Osmose on 500 strains of bacteria with an effective kill rate of 100 percent. Osmose even works against antibiotic-resistant strains. Medtric is now aiming for FDA 510(k) clearance on Osmose.
Medtric beat out second place finisher OsComp Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and BlackLocus from Carnegie Mellon University. Medici Medical Technologies from Duke University placed fifth.
Osmose was invented at Purdue University, where the founders are studying. Medtric was founded in 2010.
