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BLEEDING
EDGE DESIGN
Can an emergency doctor and engineer
put their lifesaving technology in the hands
of everyday people?
Dr. Marc Curial calls himself “an
accidental entrepreneur.” An ER
physician by practice, he loved
the fast-paced, all-hands-on-
deck energy of emergency
medicine. Then, one summer day
in 2019, an idea yanked him in a
new direction.
He was at a playground with his friend Chris
Terriff, watching their kids climb the playground’s
towering jungle gym — narrowly avoiding falls that
could lead to bumps, bruises, bleeding — when he
asked Terriff something to the effect of, “How hard
could it be to build an EpiPen to slow down traumatic
bleeding?”
“Doesn’t seem that complicated,” replied his friend,
an engineer.
The logical next question was how many lives could that
save? Worldwide, uncontrolled bleeding is a leading
cause of preventable death among trauma patients.
Tranexamic acid (TXA), the best and most readily
available treatment, prevents blood clots from break-
ing down too quickly, helping slow down uncontrollable
bleeding, and the sooner patients receive it, the
better it works. In trauma situations where timing is
everything, TXA is remarkably effective. The problem
is that it’s an intravenous drug, meaning only trained
medical professionals can administer it, often costing
crucial minutes that patients can’t spare.
With this in mind the two of them got to work.
Terriff led design and Curial led the science and
business of what would become MACH32 — the
company behind the world’s first trauma response
autoinjector.
MACH32 hopes to make administering TXA as easy
as treating anaphylaxis with EpiPens and as accessible
as naloxone, insofar as making the life-saving tool avail-
able to all, even bystanders, regardless of training.
by Areeha Mahal
Such a tool could be critical for treating emergency
trauma in remote regions, such as workers injured at
secluded job sites or soldiers in combat. It could even be
the answer to solving the leading cause of preventable
maternal death worldwide, postpartum hemorrhage,
which kills 200 people daily, according to the World
Health Organization. “The end goal,” says Curial, “is to
allow anyone to save a loved one from bleeding
to death.”
The prototype fits conveniently in pockets, but most
injuries treated with TXA require a minimum 10 mill-
ilitres of the drug — far more than could fit inside a
typical EpiPen. To overcome this, MACH32 concentrated
the drug by five times to match the effect of a standard
intravenous dose of TXA.
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