This is a tale of four technocrats with varied experience — one managed the medical devices firm Relisys, another is chemical scientist, the third one is a spice extractor and the last one spent a decade setting up manufacturing facilities in Japan and elsewhere.

What brought them together is a Post Graduate Programme at Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. While doing the course that is confined to experienced managers, they struck on a business idea with a global potential. They began working on a bio-absorbable drug eluting stent (called 3V Avatar) that becomes part of patient’s body in just 18 months.

They set up S3V Vascular Technologies with an initial investment of Rs 20 crore to work on devices that target vascular interventions and drug delivery. With medical devices firms moving to the fourth generation stents that slowly dissolve into arteries, the start-up firm has begun research and development of bio-absorbable stents.

Clinical trails of the stent 3V Avatar will be started. The company expects that the stent would be ready for use in 24 months after completing different phases of trials and permissions. The company has done preliminary work on the stent at two laboratories in Italy and Germany. It is scouting for a location in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka to locate its base in India.

A stent is a small ball-pen spring-like mesh that is inserted inside an artery through angioplasty to ensure free flow of blood. Some of these stents are coated with drugs to prevent clogging again. But these stents carry certain life-threatening risks along as the body finds it difficult to assimilate the foreign body.

Mr Badari Narayan, who was former Managing Director of Relisys, said the fourth generation stents gave no scope for side-effects. “Our stent will be absorbed by the vessel in 18 months, leaving no scope for stent-induced problems. As it soaked up into the blood vessel, the stent releases a pro-healing drug during the 18-month period and anti-proliferative drugs for the first 90 days,” he said.

“We will raise Rs 120 crore more to set up a research and development and manufacturing facility. Of this, we are raising Rs 30 crore from investors and the remaining from banks. We are evaluating three locations — two in Karnataka and one in Andhra Pradesh — to set up the facility,” he said.

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