Seguro Surgical, Inc. Information

Seguro Surgical, Inc. is a medical device development company specializing in the commercialization of surgical instrumentation. The initial product, “Lap-Pak”, is a medical device designed for the roughly two million major abdominal surgeries (“laparotomies”) performed annually in the United States. Current practice utilizes cotton towels or sponges to reposition the bowel and allow access to the surgical area. This procedure is time consuming, presents potential safety risks to patients and can lead to post-operative complications. Seguro’s “Lap-Pak” device is a flexible, one–piece, device contoured to enable the rapid and secure re-positioning of the bowels to expose the surgical site. Lap-Pak can be placed quickly and eliminates the need for repositioning during surgery. This allows the surgical team to fully focus on the surgery while saving up to 25 minutes of expensive surgery time (approximately $1,000 savings per procedure). The device was developed by surgeons and biomedical engineering students from the BME undergraduate design course at Johns Hopkins under the leadership of Robert E. Bristow, M.D., M.B.A., Professor, Director, Kelly Gynecological Oncology Service and Director, Johns Hopkins Ovarian Cancer Center of Excellence and Dr. Santillan, Assistant Professor Gynecologic Oncology, Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Texas Tech University Health Center, Paul L. Foster School of Medicine. Post operative complications associated with the use of cotton towels in the approximately two million laparotomies performed each year in the United States result in 380,000 hospitalizations costing the healthcare system $15 billion (Procedures in US Hospitals, 2003: HCUP Fact Book No.7; www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/factbk7/factbk7d.htm). The Lap-Pak platform technology has the potential to reduce these complications while improving surgical efficiency.