CAPS Medical

Despite great progress in understanding cancer, little has changed in cancer therapy over the past 40-50 years; most treatments extend survival without providing a cure. Dr. Jacob Cohen, Director of the Department of Otolaryngology ― Head & Neck Surgery at Rambam Health Care Campus, has treated his vocal cord cancer patients with the same laser technology for years. While laser excision does indeed remove the tumor, the process is not selective and healthy tissue surrounding the tumor is also removed. Cohen constantly asked himself: how can I kill the cancer cells while keeping the healthy cells intact, thereby inflicting minimal damage to my patients?

He and other researchers had long been aware of the existence of non-thermal atmospheric plasma (NTAP). Research had demonstrated its effectiveness against cancer cells – without killing neighboring healthy cells. However, there was no safe way to introduce NTAP to a human body cavity and the research had gone no further. Cohen’s research team, consisting of Rambam colleagues and Technion physicist Prof. Yakov Krasnik, worked for two years to develop a safe technique. Their solution was deceptively simple: to use a catheter to transport the NTAP into a human body cavity. These first steps were funded by a grant from the Spark Research Program at Rambam and a subsequent two-year grant from the Israeli government.

At this point, Cohen found an ideal partner to help pursue development, the MedX Xelerator incubator. However, before this could be formalized, a patent needed to be filed and then the whole process of technology transfer needed to be managed. Rambam MedTech Ltd entered the picture. They handled the critical patent application process, which meant filing a strong patent that would be easy to defend. Rambam MedTech then managed the licensing for CAPS Medical to commercialize the technology.

Together with the incubator, Cohen found an ideal colleague to serve as CEO of what would become a new company, CAPS Medical – Mr. Ilan Uchtiel. Following the technology transfer, a working prototype was built and tested in animals. The entire process was surprisingly rapid, and within a short time, Uchtiel began looking for capital to move the startup out of the incubator stage and into full-fledged industry. However, it was now 2020 and traditional face-to-face meetings were impossible due to the pandemic. Nevertheless, relying only on Zoom and other technologies for communication, he raised $5 million.

Today, CAPS Medical has offices in Netanya, Israel with ten employees and more than $2.5 million in funding to date. The first human trials involving bladder cancer patients are scheduled to begin by the end of 2021. All this happened because Dr. Jacob Cohen was not satisfied with the status quo and Rambam MedTech, Ltd. was there to help navigate the complex patent application and technology licensing paths