25 Years of Unfinished Business in Emphysema. Apreo Health Is Going Back In with Karun Naga

In this episode, Henry Norton sits down with Karun Naga, CEO of Apreo Health, to talk about one of the most underserved patient populations in respiratory medicine and why everything the industry tried before was heading in the wrong direction. Karun takes us inside the 25-year journey from the original Emphasys Medical valve device through to Apreo's BREATHE Airway Scaffold, a fundamentally different, non-destructive approach to treating severe emphysema.

He explains how a June 2021 cadaver lab session in Minnesota confirmed the science, how the team raised $130 million despite most investors wanting to wait, and why a mechanical engineer turned patent lawyer ended up leading a clinical-stage medtech company.

Key Topics

Why the original emphysema valve approach was answering the wrong question

How Apreo's BREATHE Airway Scaffold works differently to every predecessor

The Foundry's venture studio model and what "maniacal focus" actually looks like

IP strategy for medtech founders: filing early, going broad, and securing global options

Raising $130M when most investors wanted to wait for the data

Related Insights

The career path from mechanical engineering to patent law to medtech CEO

Why "publish or perish" and intellectual property protection go hand in hand

How The Foundry turns clinical curiosity into venture-backed companies

What Inari and Penumbra prove about building an entire market through focused execution

Core Challenges

Severe emphysema leaves patients with as little as 60-70% of their functional lung tissue, and the diseased tissue hyperinflates to two to three times its size, compressing healthy lung and making every breath a struggle.

Every prior interventional approach, from valves to coils to vapour, has been destructive to the lung, limiting treatment to a narrow subset of patients.

Apreo Health's BREATHE Airway Scaffold takes a collaborative, tissue-sparing approach: a minimally invasive implant that releases trapped air without sacrificing lung tissue, designed to reach the majority of severe emphysema patients who current treatments cannot help.

🎧 Tune in now to hear how Karun Naga and Apreo Health are rewriting the playbook on emphysema treatment after 25 years of unfinished business.

The Crux of MedTech podcast is brought to you by Cruxx, a specialist surgical robotics recruitment agency.

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