Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem are you solving?
Sedivention: One in five Europeans is affected by obesity today. For the year 2030, an estimated 1.5 billion severely overweight people worldwide are projected, with a body mass index of more than 30 kg/m2. These people are often excluded and ridiculed. And they suffer from secondary diseases like diabetes, hypertension, or cancer. But they cannot simply lose weight through more discipline, diet, and exercise, because at a certain point, obesity leads to a dysregulation of hunger and satiety signals, resulting in persistent, insatiable hunger.
Patients lose their hunger
We are developing a medical device that, similar to a gastroscopy, is inserted into the stomach and ablates the nerve branches there that transmit this excessive hunger signal to the brain. In effect, patients lose their hunger and can then lose weight. The medication Wegovy, which Elon Musk promoted, works in principle similarly, only via the bloodstream and not via the nerves.
Munich Startup: But that already exists, doesn’t it?
Sedivention: There are medications, gastric balloons, and surgical procedures for gastric reduction. What doesn’t exist yet and what our device will be able to do: a one-time, minimally invasive, long-lasting reduction of hunger without medication, without implant, without surgery. The procedure can be performed by any specialist in gastrointestinal diseases in their practice on an outpatient basis – just like a gastroscopy.
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Sedivention: We are an experienced team of doctors, engineers, and managers. We know each other from our previous careers and now want to create something completely new together. We asked ourselves: what is the biggest unsolved health problem facing humanity for which there is still no good treatment option. And that is obesity.
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Sedivention: Finding investors for a very early-stage startup. We are not a university spinoff and had to invest our own funds in research from the beginning. On the other hand, our team has extensive experience in developing medical devices, knows the regulatory processes, and the patents belong to us.
Therapy deployment in five years
Munich Startup: Where do you want to be in one year, where in five years?
Sedivention: In one year, we want to have further developed our prototype toward a clinically deployable, serially producible product. In five years, the first studies should be completed and the catheter should be on the market. After we won startup competitions and awards, we have already received a lot of mail from obesity patients who have great hopes for our medical device. In five years, their hope should be fulfilled and the device should be available for treatment.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Sedivention: Wonderful. We have contacts and collaborations with both universities and are very grateful for the great support and funding from Bayern Innovativ, BayStartup, BioM, UnternehmerTUM, Bayern Capital, and the Bavarian Ministry of Economics. But we also owe a great deal to the HTGF and Science4Life from Hesse. There are many startups in the Munich area and we are delighted by many invitations to events where you can learn a lot and make many contacts.
Munich Startup: Hidden champion or shooting star?
Sedivention: We hope to become both, but right now perhaps better described as a game changer.
