Cécile Oury
Research Director, FNRS & CEO, CMD-Coat
Professeur Patrizio Lancellotti
Head of the Cardiology Department, CHU Liège
CMD-Coat, a company resulting from research at Liège University, has the mission of preventing complications caused by clotting and infection linked to medical devices that come into contact with blood. This revolutionary development will alleviate a huge and very expensive public health problem.
Complications due to infected or blocked catheters occur every day in the hospital setting. Infections and clotting are the two most important complications linked to medical devices that come into contact with blood.
“Seven years ago, Professor Patrizio Lancellotti (head of the Cardiology Department at CHU Liège) and myself started researching this issue”, explains Cécile Oury, Research Director at the FNRS and CEO of CMD-Coat since January 2023. “Initially we targeted prosthetic heart valves, before founding the company CMD-Coat, focusing on the development and market launch of our coating technology: Coati-X®.”
Concretely, Coati-X® consists of a polymer-based layer with a gradual, local action at the surface of medical devices, releasing medication to combat infections and clotting and preventing related complications.
Applicable to other medical devices
CMD-Coat currently has four employees: Dr Sébastien Cajot, PhD (COO), Dr Abdelhafid Aqil, PhD (project leader in polymer chemistry), Dr Bartosz Ditkowski, PhD (project leader in biology) and Robin Scalbert (Masters in biology). Initially the team is taking aim at the intravenous catheters market “because of its size, with more than a billion intravenous catheters implanted worldwide each year”, continues Cécile Oury. Nevertheless, CMD-Coat is not planning to stop there: the universal coating can be adapted for any type of medical device and numerous applications are possible in both human and veterinary clinical practice.
