Meghana Helder spent years watching patients survive the delicate work of aortic arch repair only to wake up with strokes, kidney failure, or lungs that wouldn't quite recover. The problem wasn't the surgery itself but the brutal workaround surgeons have relied on for decades: cooling patients to near-freezing temperatures, stopping their hearts entirely, and racing against a 40-minute clock before brain damage sets in.
Now Helder, who trained as a cardiovascular surgeon at Mayo Clinic, thinks she has a better idea. Her Minneapolis-based startup Octin Health recently secured $2.5 million in seed funding from Groove Capital and the Minnesota Women's Investment Collective to bring a device called Elika to market—one designed to keep blood flowing to the brain even as surgeons cut into the aorta.
The stakes are considerable. Aortic arch operations, performed on patients with life-threatening aneurysms or dissections, carry operative mortality rates ranging from approximately 16 to 20 percent. Complications from the current technique, known as deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, strike up to 39 percent of patients, according to a review published in the Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia. Disabling strokes occur in roughly 6 percent of cases, a 2022 meta-analysis found, while permanent neurologic injury affects anywhere from 3 to 12 percent of those who undergo the procedure.
"The only way we know to prevent it is by replacing the aneurysmal section of the aorta before the tear happens," Helder said in an interview earlier this year, her frustration with the status quo palpable.
A Device Born from Surgical Frustration
Elika works by maintaining continuous blood flow to vital organs while simultaneously occluding the aorta to give surgeons the bloodless field they need. It's an engineering challenge that has eluded the medical device industry for years, in part because the aortic arch sits at one of the most unforgiving junctures in human anatomy—where the body's largest artery curves sharply, branching off to supply the brain, arms, and upper body.
The traditional approach involves cooling patients to between 18 and 20 degrees Celsius, essentially putting them in a state of suspended animation. Circulation stops entirely. The clock starts ticking. Surgeons work quickly, knowing that every additional minute without blood flow compounds the risk of catastrophic brain injury.
Helder founded Octin in 2024, drawing on a publication record that includes more than 26 papers. But credentials alone don't guarantee success in the notoriously difficult medical device market, where the path from prototype to FDA clearance is long, expensive, and littered with well-intentioned failures.
To improve her odds, Helder assembled a team with deep experience navigating that path. Chief Operating Officer Laura Walter came from Boston Scientific. Chief Technology Officer Adam Tschida previously served as COO and CTO at Crossfire Medical, with earlier stints at Philips, Spectranetics, and Covidien. Patrick Shanley, the chief regulatory officer, ran operations at Attune Medical before its acquisition by Haemonetics.
The board features John Slump, a medtech founder and investor whose ventures have generated more than $1.25 billion in exits, and Scott Ward, the former CEO of Cardiovascular Systems, which Abbott purchased for $851 million in cash in 2023. Wilson Szeto, chief of cardiovascular surgery at the University of Pennsylvania and a recognized authority on aortic disease, serves as a clinical advisor.
The Long Road to Validation
Octin has been methodical in building its case. The company partnered with Resolution Medical, a Minnesota contract manufacturer, for early prototyping work. It joined the MedTech Innovator cardiovascular cohort and the UCSF Rosenman RISE program, both designed to accelerate promising medical technologies. A collaboration with HITLAB focuses on clinical validation, economic modeling, and usability testing.
The company filed a U.S. patent application for its aortic arch repair system in October 2025, which was published in February 2026. It also secured the ELIKA trademark.
In September, Octin won the Minnesota Cup Grand Prize, netting $76,000 across three awards from a field of more than 2,800 applicants. "This is a common-sense solution for complex procedures," Walter said at the time, though she likely knows that common sense and surgical innovation don't always align neatly.
The device doesn't aim to replace existing approaches entirely. Terumo Aortic's Thoraflex Hybrid device, which won FDA approval in 2022 and uses a frozen elephant trunk technique combining grafts and stents, offers one alternative for certain cases. Elika is positioned instead as a perfusion and occlusion adjunct, something surgeons could deploy across a broader range of open arch procedures without fundamentally changing their surgical techniques.
What Comes Next
Octin plans to submit Elika for FDA clearance in early 2027, assuming the development timeline holds. That's an eternity in startup years, but a relatively tight window in the world of cardiovascular devices, where regulatory scrutiny is intense and clinical evidence requirements are demanding.
Acute Type A aortic dissections, the most urgent indication for arch repair, occur in approximately 1.7 per 100,000 people annually in the United States. Thoracic aortic aneurysms affect between 5 and 10 per 100,000. The patient population isn't enormous, but the unmet need is stark.
Whether Elika can deliver on its promise remains an open question. Helder and her team have built something that looks credible on paper, with a strong roster and early validation from respected programs. But medical devices live or die in the operating room, where elegance of design meets the messy reality of human anatomy. The real test won't come from investors or competition judges. It will come from surgeons willing to trust a new tool with their most fragile patients.
