Personal experiences led Ashwinraj Karthikeyan to create Phoenix-Aid — a cost-effective, comprehensive wound care dressing to help prevent infections and accelerate the healing of chronic wounds.
Karthikeyan had started college when he learned his former co-worker at the JCPenney store in Oshkosh died from a surgical site infection. “If something like that can happen here, what about in underserved markets like India?” he wondered.
At the same time, Karthikeyan spent much of his teen years watching his father Annamalai, a physicist, work with active carbon in a lab setting.
“Active carbon is a high purity of carbon with microscopic pores on its surface that are even smaller than viruses,” says Karthikeyan, who began developing Phoenix-Aid while a student at the University of Virginia.
He began thinking of offering his product in his homeland of India, which has the world’s largest population of diabetic patients. In India, the wounds are treated with a complicated foot covering that needs to be wrapped daily by someone else.
“People with diabetes can have nerve damage that causes sores or blisters to form without them knowing it. People have to keep going to the hospital, which isn’t always easy,” Karthikeyan says. “Phoenix-Aid is a wound care dressing for diabetic foot ulcers and would help a lot of people.”
Karthikeyan’s company, InMEDBio, is in the process of preparing Phoenix-Aid for a clinical trial in India. At the same time, he’s updating the product design to prepare Phoenix-Aid to be trialed in the U.S. Product development and manufacturing take place at a lab in Neenah.
In mid-July, InMEDBio was nominated for a Wisconsin Innovation Award. Karthikeyan has received multiple grants to help further product development and plans to apply for a National Institutes of Health grant later this year.
“I am also seeking to raise capital to keep moving product development forward,” he says.
