Materna Medical is a company devoted to improving women’s pelvic health through technology
Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Tracy MacNeal, President and CEO of Materna Medical, a company devoted to improving women’s pelvic health through technology.
The company’s product, Milli, is an all-in-one vaginal trainer, empowering women to overcome vaginal tightness through gradually control sizing to meet their intimate health goals.
Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screen, treat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor.
Highlights from the interview:
- MacNeal joined Materna three years ago when they were looking for a commercialization CEO. She chose Materna because she rarely saw startups with a market this size with so little competition, and huge unmet needs. The company had good IP, good regulatory, and clinical commercial traction, and now she found that working in the women’s health space is the most gratifying job she ever had.
- The crowded spaces in pelvic health are around pelvic floor laxity, with disorders like pelvic organ prolapse or incontinence, where the pelvic floor is too loose. Materna’s first product, Milli, solves for high tone pelvic disorder, which is the opposite problem where the pelvic floor muscles are too tight, which is mostly a secondary condition caused by menopause, sexual trauma, or childbirth injuries.
- Materna is one of only three products that have FDA clearance in the space and it’s the only expanding dilator. Milli is a dilator that expands inside the anatomy at the patient’s discretion one millimeter at a time, and it’s the only product like that. Materna wants to be the ones to really help these patients get treated and the only way to do that is to partner with clinicians to put out clinical education materials, case studies, and bring everybody to the table.
- The current standard of care is essentially a set of like five things that look like sex toys, which the patient is supposed to use to crank the tissue back open. Materna is trying to just replace it with a simpler, digital medical device that expands. The company will also eventually have an app, where there’ll be a way for the patients to understand and track their progress.
- According to AARP, 80% of residents graduating as OBGYNs have no training in menopause, even though there are 63 million Americans in menopause. One of the old issues in women’s health is that women didn’t want to talk about anything below the waist, it was very embarrassing, it didn’t even have a polite name, which means clinicians are now faced with trying to understand this condition. What Materna is trying to do is help those clinicians learn the patterns of these patients so that they can quickly identify, diagnose, and then help the patient recover from secondary vaginismus.
- Materna’s second product, which is in the pipeline, is a dilator that is used during acute labor and delivery in the hospital to prevent pelvic floor injury during childbirth. After a woman’s had a baby vaginally, she’s nine times more likely to have prolapse and incontinence than women who haven’t. In a pilot study, Materna reduced pelvic floor injury by 60%.
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