Health Drugmaker Organon backs Claria Medical for the development of hysterectomy hardware

Organon has gone in early on by investing in a relatively new medical tech company called Claria Medical that is working to transform hysterectomy. Claria Medical, much like women’s health Drugmaker Organon, is focused on women’s healthcare. The company produces minimally-invasive medical devices that are meant for the unmet needs in the field of gynecology. Claria Medical intends to manufacture a device that could help remove the uterus via a less invasive laparoscopic method that is also faster and safer than the practices being used currently.

Organon & Co. is an American pharma company that operates out of Jersey City, New Jersey, and was founded in Oss, Netherlands two years ago in 2020. Its predecessor Organon International was founded a century ago in 1923.

The drugmaker focuses on developing drugs for women’s healthcare and specializes in hormone replacement therapy, contraception, and reproductive medicine among other core therapeutic fields.

The American company acquired Claria Medical with an investment of $8M upfront from the Research & Development budget. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation had both given grant funding to Claria Medical, which is a pre-series A company.

In early 2021, Merck & Co., the corporate parent of Organon bought Alydia Health, which was a medical devices manufacturer that had previously won Fierce Medtech Fierce 15. Due to this takeover, which set Merck & Co. back $240M, Organon’s portfolio of medical devices was established. It included implants and a variety of medicines for birth control, among other drugs, as well as the company’s Jada system which is used to curtail blood loss at the time of postpartum hemorrhage.

Kevin Ali, CEO of Organon said, “Collaborations such as our agreement with Claria Medical are integral to our business development approach. We search across the entire horizon for potential solutions—be they medicines, devices, or other technologies—that can improve the health of women.”

With over 500,000 hysterectomies done in the U.S. annually, the gynecological procedure has become one of the most common surgeries in the country. Usually, the procedure is done using a process called morcellation through which the removal of the uterus is done by cutting it into smaller bits, which takes a lot of time.

However, it has been noticed that due to this process, cells are deposited into the tissues surrounding the area. In extreme cases, uterine fibroids may have cancers that could be very harmful if turned loose inside the body.

A warning has been in place by the FDA against some morcellation methods for over ten years. In 2020, the FDA advised such methods were only to be used if there was a system in place to contain the cells and avoid them being released into the abdominal cavity.

Claria aims to enable surgeons to get rid of large tissue masses through the smallest possible surgical opening, which could change open hysterectomies into a procedure that requires minimal invasion and also reduce the risk of cancer.

After the first transvaginal hysterectomy-performing robot was cleared by the FDA in 2021, the first patient cases were completed in mid-2022 using the Anovo system by Momentis Surgical. The system includes two instruments that replicate a human’s arm with wrist, elbow, and shoulder joints.