Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Knoxville Business News Tennessee Mountain Scenery Background
April 20, 2016 | Tom Ballard

ACT executes major licensing agreement with Toray Industries

ACTBy Tom Ballard, Chief Alliance Officer, PYA

Chattanooga-based Advanced Catheter Therapies, Inc. (ACT) reached a major milestone this week with the announcement that it has signed a worldwide license agreement with Toray Industries, Inc., enabling the latter to manufacture, market and sell ACTs Occlusion Perfusion Catheter® (OPC).

“We’ve licensed it to Toray for one field of use,” Paul J. Fitzpatrick, ACT Chief Executive Officer, told us. The Tokyo-based, 90-year old company’s catheter will be used to deliver treatments for vascular stenosis and restenosis.

OPC is a multi‐lumen balloon catheter designed to temporarily occlude a specific region from blood flow to allow the targeted delivery of various therapeutic and diagnostic agents to the peripheral vasculature. The catheter, which is disease and agent agnostic, has the ability to create a localized treatment chamber and place the agent circumferentially into the vasculature of the treatment chamber. Inflow and outflow ports allow for chamber filling, evacuation and flushing.

For Fitzpatrick, this week’s announcement is a validation of ACT’s strategy and the first of many announcements that he expects in the future.

“We’ve executed our business model and shown it is going to work,” he says. “We have a number of endovascular catheters in the queue. We’re generating revenue.”

Fitzpatrick emphasized that the agreement with Toray is for one field of use, meaning other opportunities exist.

“We’re going to continue looking for other partners for other uses,” he said, listing coronary stenosis and restenosis, oncology, dialysis, venous insufficiency and lytic therapy as areas of opportunity.

ACT, which was founded in 2008 in Atlanta and moved to Chattanooga in 2011, develops the catheters to a certain stage and then seeks partners like Toray.

“We’re really an R & D company,” Fitzpatrick explains, reinforcing a point he made in a March 2013 article on teknovation.biz.

Since moving to Chattanooga, ACT has secured about $7 million in funding through two rounds.

“The majority of our funding, probably $5 million or more, came from Tennessee, and most of that from Chattanooga,” Fitzpatrick proudly noted. “The proceeds from this deal (with Toray) will fund ongoing research and development.”

For more information on this week’s announcement, read the ACT news release (ACT-Toray Licensing Agreement).


Don’t Miss Out on the Southeast’s Latest Entrepreneurial, Business, & Tech News!

Sign-up to get the Teknovation Newsletter in your inbox each morning!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.


No, thanks!