This Minnesota startup is trying to solve a big challenge for radiation therapy: breathing

As patients lay on beds with massive machines swirling around them during radiation therapy, one simple obstacle stands in the way of the complex technology delivering optimal cancer treatment: breathing.

Radiation therapy must be carefully targeted to tumors to avoid damage to surrounding healthy tissue, but the motion of breathing can disrupt that precision. Current solutions for respiratory motion management may only work in select scenarios or require patients to remove clothing.

Enter the Eden Prairie-based medtech firm EmpNia and its new device, eMotus. Founder and CEO Manojeet Bhattacharya said the device looks as simple as a piece of tape holding down a strand of hair, and it works with many imaging and treatment systems.

“There’s nothing in the market that is a universal technology,” Bhattacharya said. Other devices managing respiratory motion don’t work across the entire universe of imaging and radiation delivery technologies, he added.

Late last month, eMotus received U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance to help doctors plan and perform radiation treatment, taking into account the tumor motion due to patient breathing. Now, Bhattacharya is lifting his startup out of stealth mode after raising more than $3 million, eyeing a limited release beginning in August.

“We want this device to be the go-to device for every scenario,” Bhattacharya said. He first learned about the effect of breathing in radiation therapy while undergoing postdoctoral training at Indiana University decades ago.

Dr. Stephanie Terezakis, head of the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Department of Radiation Oncology, said radiation oncologists’ goal is to target cancer as precisely as possible with a radiation beam while also minimizing the radiation dose for surrounding healthy tissue and organs.

“When we’re trying to deliver the radiation with that level of accuracy, we need to take into account the fact that the tumor itself is moving,” Terezakis said.

To do this, doctors use 4-dimensional scans that help plan for motion ahead of time and use technologies such as abdominal compression devices to limit the amount of motion a patient experiences, Terezakis said. Other breathing regulation technologies work with only certain manufacturers’ machines, Terezakis said.

“There are some times where you need particular machine characteristics to give the best kind of treatment,” Terezakis said. “But there are other times where there could be [benefit to] a more standardized approach across different technologies.”

Bhattacharya’s technology doesn’t require health care providers to purchase bulky capital equipment. He said the eMotus marks the first introduction of a disposable device for motion management.

The eMotus combines software and hardware to track the pace, frequency and amplitude of a patient’s breath. Health care providers see green bars corresponding with slopes in a waveform chart indicating when the oncologist should fire off the radiation beam. Providers can automate the system to fire the radiation beam with some systems. The system can also help perform breath-hold procedures, a commonly used technique for motion management, Bhattacharya said.

A patient feels a fiber optic sensor about the width of a human hair attached to their chests by a piece of clear tape, Bhattacharya said. The technology doesn’t require patients to remove clothing, maintaining more dignity while undergoing these procedures, he added.

Bhattacharya founded the company just days before COVID-19 lockdowns shut down access to hospitals for research in 2020. He had quit his job at Siemens Healthineers to pursue the idea a few months earlier. He compared the process of building a startup to jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down, quoting entrepreneur Reid Hoffman.

“It sounds very good, but you have no idea what that means,” Bhattacharya said about building an idea into a business.

Bhattacharya took the company out of stealth mode, meant to protect the company’s intellectual property, after the FDA cleared the device last month. The company still feels stealthy, though, operating out of a shared warehouse space in Eden Prairie where rock music from a nearby business tenant echoed on Tuesday.

“I work with a number of CEOs,” said EmpNia‘s consulting CFO, Leota Pearson, “and I think you know one of the things I particularly respect is just his methodical process he’s taken with the development.”

Bhattacharya has raised roughly $3.5 million. He’ll need $6 million to $8 million to fully launch the device, which is planned after a limited launch starting Aug. 1, he said.

“In the next two or three years, we want to have a significant portion of the procedures in the U.S. captured,” Bhattacharya added. He hopes to one day commercialize it outside of the United States.