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Recognized for its ability to avoid pain, scarring, and long recovery times, minimally invasive vascular access procedures (VAP) continues to gain popularity year over year. That said, VAP does have inherent risks, with patients in nearly 20 percent of cases seeing at least some negative impact related to bleeding. Saranas is a Texas-based company that is focused on minimizing these risks by providing early detection and monitoring of internal bleeding complications via bioimpedance measurements.

Now, I will show how you can balance clinical and entrepreneurial efforts. First, let’s dispense with the 800-pound gorilla lurking in the corner: Unless you are overwhelmed with a constant flurry of real game-changing ideas — and let me assure you are not regardless of any contrary conviction— the worst thing you can do is to abandon or significantly curtail your clinical practice.If you became a physician for any reason other than improving your parents’ conditions you should stop reading now because this article isn’t written for you. The term “balance” makes clear enough that this is for those entrepreneurs who are determined to continue their clinical practice.

In this retrospective cohort study of 17 672 consecutive patients who underwent a transcatheter aortic valve replacement, endovascular aneurysm repair, or percutaneous left ventricular assist device implant, 18% experienced bleeding complications. Patients with bleeding complications (compared with those without) had increased in-hospital mortality, length of stay, and health care cost.

Houstonians have been lauding the city’s economic diversity for months as the Bayou City has continued to feel the effects of low oil prices. Specifically, business leaders and economists have pointed to the health care and biotech industries as the lifeboat for the city’s downturn.

Money is not the most important thing in life. Time is. And if you think this is a platitude, you should spend a day in the shoes of the practicing physician who is trying to make the world better. Not only by his or her patient contacts, but by conceiving, nurturing and ultimately bringing to market technologies that — with intelligence, grit and a bit of luck — will impact larger numbers of patients than one will ever meet in an entire career.

Saranas, a Houston medical device company, expects to announce this week that it has raised $2.35 million to further develop a souped-up sheath that can detect blood leaks caused by catheters in real time. The funding came from existing investors, including members of the GOOSE Society, such as Vanguard Ventures co-founder Jack Gill, and Houston Angel Network members.

While catheter-based interventional procedures have major advantages, there’s always a chance that a vessel can get ruptured when introducing the sheath through which instruments are snaked to the treatment site. Undetected, this kind of bleeding can have serious consequences for patients, sometimes even leading to death. A new device from Saranas, a Houston, Texas firm, may soon be commonplace in cath labs for detecting bleeding due to ruptured vessels.

Product innovator Cambridge Consultants has been chosen by Texas biomedical start-up Saranas to help develop an early-warning system for bleeding complications during interventional catheter-based procedures. The device is aimed at medical procedures requiring access to a blood vessel – such as transcatheter aortic valve replacements (TAVRs), where the femoral artery is used to gain access to the heart.

This year about 20 million patients in the U.S. will undergo a procedure in which a doctor will thread a catheter into a blood vessel to treat a cardiac ailment, say, or provide dialysis or chemotherapy. But in five percent of these “vascular-access procedures,” the catheter accidentally punctures the vessel, causing a slow leak of blood that can be hard to detect—but which can wind up wreaking havoc. Houston medtech startup Saranas says it’s developed a device that can detect the bleeding within a matter of minutes.

The Houston Technology Center (HTC) has just revealed the winners of its 2013 Goradia Innovation Prize. This event of recognition, in collaboration with Opportunity Houston, awards nearly $150,000 in cash during the 2013 Innovation Conference and Showcase to individual finalists and starting companies that have yet to largely commercialize their innovations in the Texas Gulf Coast region. The winners are selected based on their discovery’s commercial potential, a sound business plan, potential to contribute to local job growth, and likelihood of success in the long run.