Infuse Retrievable Stentgraft: From Battlefield Device to Breakthrough in Targeted Therapy
At 25, Dr. Bryan Tillman earned his first patent—for a cancer vaccine that was ultimately licensed. A surgeon with a PhD, he’s always had one foot in the operating room and the other in the lab, looking for ways to bridge medicine and engineering. “I feel like innovation has always been part of my career,” he said.
That instinct led him to develop a retrievable stent. Its first mission was lifesaving and straightforward: to stop catastrophic bleeding long enough for injured military personnel to reach the hospital. Years later, that invention took on new meaning when Tillman’s son was diagnosed with cancer at age four.
A Battlefield Invention Meets a Family Crisis
“He’s great now, but he went through three years of chemotherapy,” Tillman said. The physician watched systemic treatment flood his son’s body, affecting his body almost as much as the cancer. “It felt backwards. We have good drugs, but they can cause so much collateral damage,” he said.
For Tillman, the dots connected. What if the retrievable stent he had been developing could do more than stop bleeding? What if it could deliver medicine directly to the disease site—sparing the rest of the body?
“I tweaked the stent so it could deliver drugs in a very focused way,” he said. At first, he assumed companies already in the space would carry the technology forward. “It was an epiphany when they told me to come back after clinical trials,” he said. “ I realized the only person to march this forward was going to be me.” So march it forward, he did.
Reimagining the Stent for Precision Medicine
That realization led to Infuse Retrievable Stentgraft, a Columbus company built on technology that allows targeted delivery of drugs, genetic material, or cells through a stent that can then be removed after treatment. Early studies suggest it can concentrate therapy on a specific organ—like the liver or the wall of a diseased blood vessel. Even more promising, it can create a doorway through the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a long-standing obstacle in treating conditions like MS, Alzheimer’s, and spinal tumors.
Lessons in Innovation
The path hasn’t been linear. “Innovation means you’re going to fail,” said Dr. Tillman, “and that’s okay. I tell my residents: the test won’t work the first time, and that’s how you learn. The key is asking: how do we make it better next time? Also, keep it simple—especially in regulatory strategy. Complexity only adds cost. And don’t go it alone. Surround yourself with experts who can see pitfalls you can’t.”
What’s Next for Infuse Retrievable Stentgraft
For now, Dr. Tillman is focused on the near term: regulatory approval and scaling manufacturing. Beyond that, the horizon is wide. “With this stent, we are at just the beginning,” he says, “and I’m excited about where it can take the field.”
