Meet Aortyx – a Barcelona-based medtech scale-up, dedicated to treating aortic dissection using a bioresorbable endovascular patch. Aortic dissections – a tear in the aortic wall – kill more people than car crashes every year, according to the scale-up’s CEO and co-founder, Jordi Martorell. And Aortyx hopes to offer a treatment option that is long-lasting and effective.
This innovative company is a member of the EIC Scaling Club’s Cardiovascular Therapies Group. To learn more about Aortyx's life-saving products and research, we spoke with its CEO, Jordi.
As hinted by the scale-up’s name, Aortyx has dedicated its full capacity to treating aortic diseases, including aortic dissections. “Our objective is to cover the tear [in the aortic wall] with a bioresorbable patch that adheres to the aorta and then promotes local tissue integration,” Jordi explains, and adds that this method has the potential to save many aortic dissection patients' lives.
Similar to many medtech companies, the journey of bringing the product to life has been a lengthy one. Despite that, Aortyx’s technology has already been tested with successful outcomes in animals and cadavers, and the company is preparing to conduct its first-in-human testing within the next one to two years.
But Jordi is cautious – while the upcoming in-human testing is definitely a huge milestone for Aortyx, he’s not quick to call the company successful: “We have saved a total number of zero patients so far. We're not successful yet.”
The scale-up, however, takes great pride in being disruptive and really changing the way aortic dissections are treated by better understanding the biomechanics of the artery. “We design our product thinking about the organ, and this is something that has never been done in our field,” Jordi tells us about the unique approach of Aortyx.
The CEO adds that treatment efforts have traditionally focused on preserving the artery’s very primary function, which is simply distributing blood flow. However, the actual, crucial functionality of the artery – which is absorbing the energy of the heartbeats – is not being adequately considered. Jordi also notes that the aorta was only recently reclassified as an organ, and adds that while Aortyx has been giving the aorta the importance it deserves since the very beginning of their work, the rest of the industry has overlooked it for far too long.
Asked to share the origins of the idea behind Aortyx’s product, Jordi explains that he was initially researching aortic aneurysms – an overexpansion that can lead to rupture – to understand why they progress differently in some patients. As a chemical engineer learning medicine, he eventually shifted his focus to aortic dissections after a physician he worked with challenged him: could their progression models be applied to dissections to help determine if surgery was necessary?
Jordi was then shocked to learn that in more than 50% of descending aorta dissection cases, no intervention is performed because surgery is considered riskier than doing nothing. This "needs fixing" realization sparked his engineering drive. Leveraging his background in biomaterials and fluid dynamics, Jordi conceived a solution: using a patch delivered via a catheter to cover the hole in the aorta. This foundational idea, born around 2015-2016, is the core concept on which Aortyx was founded and continues to pursue today, relatively uncommon for a startup/scale-up.
“While the concept remains, we have run more than 300 iterations of our device. [...] And when they ask me – are you worried about copycats? I say – well, let them try and see how it goes. Obviously, we are protected with several patents. But the sweet spot of our work, of the entire device, is extremely complex,” the CEO comments on Aortyx’s concept. Moreover, the company is actively working to make its solution robust enough that the team would implant it in themselves.
“This is critical for us – we will not start first implant trials until not only we get the approval, but also we believe that we could implant the product in our brothers, our parents, ourselves.”
Aortyx has four co-founders, all of whom hold PhDs, and the company is actually a spin-off from the IQS School of Engineering and Hospital Clínic de Barcelona. Jordi tells us that the key moment in establishing the scale-up was convincing one of the co-founders – now the CTO, Noemí Balà – to complete her master's thesis with Jordi and another professor. Upon its completion, they decided to found the company in 2018.
Being a professor himself, Jordi started to explore various grant opportunities. In February 2019, the team decided to go all-in: “I was like – all right, let's jump in and do a seed round with friends, fools, and families. We gathered 70 people in a room, and 55 of them invested in us,” Jordi shares how Aortyx got the needed traction and capital to start building the team.
The team-building phase initially consisted exclusively of university students and a few postdoctoral researchers, but quickly expanded to combine experienced industry professionals with junior staff. Today, the core team consists of 18 members – soon to be expanded to 20 –, with about 30% having solid industry experience and the rest being junior team members who quickly grow into experts within the company.
Asked to share Aortyx’s most significant milestones, Jordi lists quite a few: “First time we implanted in an animal, first time we implanted in a cadaver, first time we had the entire system built up. There have been a lot of first times that we've been able to achieve.”
Another fascinating milestone occurred in 2022. Jordi tells us that Aortyx’s original 2018 patent was based on the expected growth and tissue regeneration on and around their patch. After a series of experiments, the independent histopathologist's report essentially recited the patent claims, confirming exactly what Aortyx had hoped and expected would happen.
Jordi adds that while raising funds has always been a critical milestone, it should not be the only metric for a company’s success: “If you need to fundraise, that means you’re losing money.” However, Aortyx takes great pride in the recent Series A funding round, in which the scale-up secured €13.8 million. This major round took over two and a half years to close and would have been impossible without the smaller, trusting investors continuously supporting the scale-up.
While fundraising is challenging for nearly every scale-up, Jordi adds that Aortyx faces resistance to change from the medical surgical community – a very understandable one: “They are the ones treating patients, and they are the ones either saving patients or not.”
The industry resistance has caused Aortyx delays in its fundraising efforts. However, the scale-up remains aware that its technology is a high-risk one as it is created to treat high-risk patients. To overcome this limitation, Aortyx attends conferences, bringing its devices and setting up stations where physicians can actively interact with the technology firsthand.
Jordi acknowledges that gaining trust is a complex process, but it builds momentum:
“Once we have a few patients, a few more physicians will be convinced, and then when a few more physicians are convinced, then even more physicians will start looking into what we offer.”
When it comes to Aortyx being a part of the EIC Scaling Club, Jordi is quick to share the benefits: “It's essential. Yesterday, I was at dinner with other entrepreneurs with whom we've become friends. Entrepreneurs must support each other. The sense of community is vital because, as entrepreneurs, we often feel like we are alone in the dark. So you need a space where you can share with others. [...] And that can make us more successful.” He adds:
“Out of 120 companies, statistically, 20-30 should succeed, and the rest would fail. But if we are together, there’s a chance to increase the number of successes. And even if it happens only to a minimal extent, that’s already a major success.”
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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