In 2019, Doctors Brian Alverson and Ravi D’Cruz were frustrated by the existing method for performing a spinal tap on an infant, which requires physically holding a baby on his or her side in the correct position while a doctor performs the procedure.
Smoltap has now entered the market with multiple children's hospitals purchasing the product. The Providence-based company is currently manufacturing more than 500 devices in Taiwan, with the first shipment of 50 arriving last month which went to distributors fulfilling initial hospital orders and sales demo units.Additionally, hospital trials are about to commence, according to Alverson, who practices at the Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence. He also said Smoltap’s patent application was recently approved by the USPTO .
As part of their Smoltap Inc.’s development, Alverson and D’Cruz teamed up with NEMIC to work on patents, product design and prototyping with Dan Nelsen at Nelsen Design. With NEMIC's help the doctors raised $100K from Brown Innovation Fund and, in April of 2022, the company raised an additional $544,000 in seed capital from MagpieX, Cherrystone, and The Charles Hood Foundation“Our mission is to reduce the failure rate, stress, and cost associated with existing infant spinal tap procedures,” he said. “Our goal is to make the Smoltap experience/procedure the standard of care.”
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