For more than a decade, opioid addiction has caused a crisis across the United States, taking lives and leaving families bereaved. One Alpharetta company says a new technology it has developed could help keep certain patients from depending on addictive painkillers after surgeries.
Synaptrix, an Alpharetta-based medical technology startup that has developed a new device that could help reduce pain after joint surgeries without using opioids, has raised $10 million. The company plans to use that money to conduct more studies on its device, called Novabloc, as it seeks approval from the Food and Drug Administration to take it to market, Synaptrix CEO Shyamy Sastry told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Last year, Synaptrix spun out of Avanos Medical, a publicly traded medical device company also based in Alpharetta. While Sastry worked at Avanos, a team began looking into different approaches to pain management and created Novabloc. But at that time, the country was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and Avanos was more focused on its respiratory health business than its pain management business.
“They were either going to take this technology and hold on to it for a while until they could really come back out of that — or look at the possibility of spinning it out,” Sastry said.
So, Synaptrix was formed. The company closed on its $10 million Series A fundraise in mid-November. The round was led by North Carolina-based Hatteras Venture Partners with involvement from Portal Innovations, Rex Health Ventures and Avanos.
Sastry said he expects to close on a second tranche of money from existing and new investors near the end of December, though he did not give a specific figure. The company is aiming to raise at least $5 million for a total of $15 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Removing opioids after surgery
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency. And it is still taking lives.
More than 81,000 people died from overdoses involving opioids in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Novabloc is designed to help patients have better pain relief and recovery from total knee and total shoulder replacement surgeries with little to no use of opioids, Sastry explained. Electrodes are placed on two large nerves near the knee or one large nerve near the shoulder. The device then releases a specific frequency of electricity that disrupts the fibers that send pain signals but doesn’t affect motor fibers, Sastry said.
It is a one-time therapy, and the patient doesn’t have to go home with any device.
Credit: handout
Credit: handout
“What that means is you take away the pain, but you can still get through recovery … your physical therapy and rehab,” he said.
The device has gone through initial studies in more than 100 patients around the country and Sastry said they saw up to 21 days of pain relief. But now to get FDA clearance, Synaptrix needs to conduct randomized clinical trials and test the device’s safety. Sastry is aiming to have all the studies done by 2026 and apply for FDA approval that year.
While that is the company’s focus for now, he hopes in the future the device can be used in other surgeries and for chronic pain.
“We’re trying to get people better health after large joint surgeries,” Sastry said, “and minimize the use of opioids.”
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