Massachusetts Institute of Technology
No-stick technology that was invented by MIT’s Professor Kripa Varansi and David Smith in 2009, and initially commercialised in 2012 as LiquiGlide, went viral for its ability to make materials such as ketchup, cosmetics and toothpaste, slide out of their containers with ease.
The company, which recently rebranded as the Arnasi Group, is now expanding into the medical space, with applications that it says could save millions of lives. Arnasi has developed a plan to launch three new biomedical products over the next four years.
The first of the products is called Revel, a deodorising lubricant designed for ostomy pouches, which are used by individuals to collect bodily waste after digestive system surgeries. Ostomy pouches require emptying multiple times per day, and issues resulting from sticking or clogging can cause embarrassing, time-consuming situations for those using them.
Revel can prevent clogging and simplify the ostomy pouch cleaning process according to Arnasi. The company says that unlike other options available, one application of its lubricant works for the entire day. The team also designed a single unit dose that fits in a pocket for added convenience.
“They need to keep it clean, and they need to use it at all times. We are solving a very important problem while helping people by giving their dignity and lifestyles back,” said Profesor Varanasi, commenting on how an ostomy pouch can impact a person’s lifestyle.
Revel officially launched in July 2024 and is FDA-registered, and has already received promising feedback from nurses and patients says the company.
Margaret, a nurse who relies on an ostomy pouch herself and cares for patients who need them after receiving colostomies and ileostomies, received samples of Revel recently: “These pouches need to be emptied frequently, and sometimes that’s very difficult to do. This particular product makes everything slide out without any problems at all, and it’s a wonderful improvement. It also lasts long enough to empty the pouch three or four times, which is great because you don’t have to carry a bunch of this stuff around.”
Arnasi CEO Dan Salain said: “When we showed it to nurses, they were blown away with the product. They asked us to get this product to the market as fast as we could, and so that’s what we’re doing.”
Arnasi’s next products will be used to prevent biofilm and bacterial infections caused by implants and catheters, and will also help people with cystic fibrosis.
“We want to create products that really help people,” said Salain. “Anything that’s implantable in the body, whether it’s a catheter, a hip, knee, or joint replacement, a breast implant, a bladder sling, those things lend themselves to our technology.”
The company says it believes that using the technology for implantable catheters and joint replacements could prevent millions of deadly infections.
“When people are getting hemodialysis catheters, they have a 33% risk of developing infections, and those that do not get those infections have a 25% chance of dying from them,” said Brienne Engel, Arnasi’s Director of Business Development. “Taking our underlying technology and applying it to catheters, for example, imparts anti-biofilm properties and also prevent things like thrombosis, or blood clotting on the outside of these catheters, which is a problem in and of itself but also provides a space for bacteria to seed.”
Read more: FDA accepts Device Master File for LiquiGlide's coating platform
The liquid-impregnated surface technology with Smith, Arnasi’s co-founder and CTO, when Smith was a graduate student in Varanasi’s lab. The research was initially funded by the MIT Energy Initiative and the MIT Deshpande Center to work on solid-liquid interfaces with broad applications for energy, water, and more.
“There’s this fundamental friction constraint called the no-slip boundary condition between a liquid and a solid, so by creating a new surface in which we can infuse a liquid that is less viscous, we can now get the product to easily slide on surfaces,” said Varanasi. “That aha moment meant we could get around a fundamental constraint in fluid dynamics.”
Shortly after the creation of the technology, Varanasi was at home trying to decide on the best application when he saw his wife across the kitchen trying to get honey out of a bottle.
Shortly after, Varanasi’s team entered the MIT $100K Entrepeneurship Competition. Following this, videos of ketchup and other materials sliding out of bottles with ease created a ‘media storm’ and brought attention to the team.
“The press exploded,” said Varanasi. “For three months, my phone didn’t stop ringing. My group website crashed. There was a lot of market pull and in response, we founded the company.”
Still operating as LiquiGlide, the company then licensed the intellectual property from MIT’s Technology Licensing Office and signed deals with some of the world’s biggest consumer packaged goods companies, which used it to create products such as fully recyclable toothpaste.
While this was going on, Arnasi’s team was also looking into the biomedical space. Varanasi’s lab had previously shown that the technology could be used to prevent occlusion for blood clots and thrombosis and reduce biofilm formation, among other applications.
“Stool accumulates in these pouches outside of people’s bodies, and they need to empty it up to eight times a day,” explains Engel. “That process has a lot of challenges associated with it: It can be difficult to drain, leaving a lot of mass behind, it takes a long time to drain, so you can spend a long time in a restroom trying to clear out your pouch, and then there’s something called pancaking that can push the pouch off the surgical opening, introducing issues like leakage, odour, and failure of the ostomy pouching system.”
Arnasi says that the team is balancing making progress on its biomedical applications while exploring other avenues for its technology, including energy, manufacturing, and agriculture to maximise its impact.
“We think of this as a company with many companies within it because of all the different areas that it can impact. Liquid-solid interfaces are ubiquitous, viscous products are everywhere, and deploying this technology to solve difficult problems has been a dream,” said Varanasi. “It’s a great example of how MIT technology can be used for the benefit of humankind.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
