Medical devices & diagnostics · Heart failure
Corveus Medical
A Houston company building a catheter that deactivates one sympathetic nerve to relieve congestion in heart failure. The animal work is done and described by the founders. No trial is registered and no regulator has authorized anything.
The lecture he went to for the food
A medical student at Baylor College of Medicine walked into a talk because lunch was free. The speaker was William Cohn, a cardiothoracic surgeon who liked to say that a cardboard prototype shown to a colleague was a perfectly good first experiment.
Ishan Kamat stayed to the end. “I went up to Dr. Cohn after the lecture and asked him how I could get involved in medical device innovation,” he later told Fogarty.
Tyler Melton had been an undergraduate at UT Austin at the same time as Kamat and never met him. He took a biomedical engineering degree into consulting, came back for an MBA at Rice, then joined the Johnson & Johnson Center for Device Innovation, which Cohn ran. The two met in the TMC Biodesign program, August 2020 to July 2021. COVID kept them out of hospitals, so they read instead.
The reservoir problem
Heart failure is usually described as a pump problem. Much of what puts patients in hospital is a plumbing problem on top of it.
The veins of the gut hold a large share of the body’s blood at rest. Sympathetic traffic down the greater splanchnic nerve squeezes that reservoir and pushes blood into the chest. In a healthy person this is a useful reflex. In a failing heart, which cannot absorb the volume, it raises filling pressures and floods the lungs.
Turn the nerve off and the reservoir stays relaxed. Kamat found that reasoning sitting in old surgical papers. “I fell in love with the idea of taking something that was known historically and applying modern tools and methods to make it feasible and safe,” he said.
Corveus proposes to reach the nerve from inside a vein, push a needle electrode through the vessel wall, stimulate to confirm the target, ablate with bipolar radiofrequency energy, then stimulate again to confirm the nerve is silent. The confirmation step is the pitch. The nerve runs along the lower thoracic spine, and Melton stresses that the device never touches the heart.
What this category has already learned
Autonomic modulation for heart failure has a long record of promising early data that did not survive a control group.
Vagal nerve stimulation was tested twice at scale. NECTAR-HF, sham controlled in 96 implanted patients, missed its remodeling endpoint in 2015 while improving quality of life scores. INOVATE-HF randomized 707 patients and reported in 2016 that stimulation did not reduce death or heart failure events. ANTHEM-HFrEF, halted early after 532 patients, reported a neutral primary endpoint in 2026.
Splanchnic ablation walked the same road faster. Surgical removal of the right greater splanchnic nerve in 10 patients with preserved ejection fraction lowered exercise filling pressures and improved symptoms at a year, published in 2021. A transvenous catheter version in 11 patients, published in 2022, looked better still. Then REBALANCE-HF, a double blind sham controlled trial of that catheter in 90 patients, reported in December 2024 that it changed exercise wedge pressure by a mean of 0.03 mm Hg against sham.
That is the field Corveus is entering, with a different device and route, and without having treated a patient.
Cadavers, then pigs, then a long pause
By the time the founders left Biodesign they had a prototype. “We started our animal studies pretty quickly and that allowed us to raise our first round of funding, which was just under $1M,” Melton told Fogarty.
The SEC record from that period is thinner: one Form D, filed in October 2021 under the original name Caridian Medical, reporting $75,000 sold against $350,000 offered, from two investors.
What followed was accelerators and prizes rather than trials. Y Combinator and MedTech Innovator in 2022. A National Science Foundation SBIR Phase I award of $255,841 in February 2023 to build the catheter and test it in animals. First place and $35,000 at the Texas A&M New Ventures Competition that June. A talk at TCT 2023, a Junkosha award in May 2024, Fogarty Innovation that August, a finalist slot at the 2025 Houston Innovation Awards.
In April 2023 Melton told an investor audience the device had been through five acute studies across 12 porcine models and a chronic study in three animals, that every animal survived, and that after 15 animals the company was ready for its first patient. He was raising $1.5 million for a three to five patient study that year. No such study appears on ClinicalTrials.gov.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA status | No 510(k), PMA or other marketing authorization in FDA device databases as of Sep 23, 2026. No breakthrough designation or investigational device exemption announced or found. Melton says the device needs premarket approval. | Public record |
| Registered trials | No ClinicalTrials.gov study lists Corveus Medical or Caridian Medical as sponsor. A first in human study has been called imminent since 2023. | Not found |
| Preclinical work | Anatomy verified in cadavers; five acute studies across 12 porcine models; a chronic study in three animals, three procedures each; all reported healthy and surviving. Stated at LSI USA ’23, April 2023. No protocol or dataset released. | Company-stated |
| Peer-reviewed papers | No PubMed record for Corveus Medical or Caridian Medical as of Sep 23, 2026. | Not found |
| Federal grant | NSF SBIR Phase I award 2213155, $255,841, awarded Feb 17, 2023. Awardee of record Caridian Medical, Inc.; principal investigator Tyler W Melton. Marked complete. No Phase II found. | Public record |
| Securities filings | One Form D, CIK 0001891109, filed Oct 29, 2021: $350,000 offered, $75,000 sold, two investors. The only SEC filing under either name. | Public record |
| Patents | Melton said in 2023 that a PCT application covers the procedure and a non-provisional covers the device, with a notice of allowance received. CB Insights lists two filings and one grant dated Jun 13, 2023. No patent number could be confirmed in a public database. | Company-stated |
| Prior surgical evidence | Ten NYHA class III patients with preserved ejection fraction had the nerve surgically ablated. Pressures and symptoms improved, and the paper records that “three patients had significant peri-procedural adverse events related to the surgical procedure itself.” Describing that literature in 2023, Melton said it showed benefit with “little to no adverse events reported.” | Differs from the paper |
| The category result | REBALANCE-HF, sham controlled, 90 patients, another company’s splanchnic ablation catheter: no difference from sham in exercise wedge pressure at one month or in clinical outcomes at 12 months. | Public record |
Read plainly: a small, grant supported engineering company with a coherent mechanism, an animal program it describes but has not published, and no clinical evidence of any kind. The idea has been tested in people by others, and the most rigorous of those tests came back flat. Corveus has a fair argument that a confirmed ablation is a different experiment. It has not run it.
What to watch
- A registered first in human study. The company has pointed to one since 2023; none has been posted.
- Whether that study includes a sham arm. After REBALANCE-HF, open label symptom gains will not persuade anyone.
- Which patients: preserved or reduced ejection fraction. The published failures and successes sit in different populations.
- An investigational device exemption or a breakthrough designation. Neither appears in any public record.
- A new Form D. The last is from 2021 and the seed round is still described as open.
In their words
“I went up to Dr. Cohn after the lecture and asked him how I could get involved in medical device innovation.”
Ishan Kamat, co-founder and CMO, Fogarty, 2024 · Independent
“I fell in love with the idea of taking something that was known historically and applying modern tools and methods to make it feasible and safe.”
Ishan Kamat, Fogarty, 2024 · Independent
“We started our animal studies pretty quickly and that allowed us to raise our first round of funding, which was just under $1M.”
Tyler Melton, co-founder and CEO, Fogarty, 2024 · Independent
“This catheter is giving physicians and families the opportunity to treat their loved ones because essentially, there is nothing right now.”
Tyler Melton, Texas A&M Engineering, 2023 · Independent
“Half of them do not respond to current therapy.”
Tyler Melton on US heart failure patients, LSI USA ’23 transcript · Company-stated
“opportunity is too solid to pass up.”
Tyler Melton on the premarket approval pathway, Medsider · Interview
“The Bay Area is a great place for innovation, and UCSF is seated at the top of it with stellar clinicians, mentorship and research.”
Ishan Kamat, cardiology fellow, UCSF, 2025 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Caridian Medical, Inc., CIK 0001891109
- Public recordNSF SBIR Phase I award 2213155
- Public recordFDA 510(k) and PMA database searches, no records
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov sponsor searches
- Public recordREBALANCE-HF randomized clinical trial
- Public recordTransvenous splanchnic nerve ablation, first-in-human
- Public recordSurgical splanchnic nerve ablation in HFpEF
- Public recordThe INOVATE-HF trial
- Public recordThe NECTAR-HF randomized controlled trial
- Public recordThe ANTHEM-HFrEF trial
- IndependentCorveus Medical Joins Fogarty Innovation to Tackle Heart Failure
- IndependentNew Ventures Competition winner working to solve heart disease
- Independent2025 Houston Innovation Awards finalists: Health Tech Business
- Independent3 Houston health tech companies join global accelerator cohort
- IndependentFellow Spotlight: Ishan Kamat, MD
- InterviewRising to the PMA Challenge as a First-Time Founder
- CompanyTyler Melton presents Corveus Medical at LSI USA ’23, transcript
- CompanyCorveus Medical website, home, team and news pages
- CompanySplanchnic nerve ablation talk, Ishan Kamat
- AwardJunkosha Innovator of the Year, category winner
- AggregatorCorveus Medical patent and funding entries
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
