Investing in the first dedicated platform to redefine how vascular access begins
The company's dual-action platform delivers localized anesthesia and vessel preparation in a single pre-procedural application, addressing the two primary barriers to successful vascular access simultaneously — without a needle, within the time window already built into clinical workflows.
METIS backed Enso at the very beginning, when conviction matters most. That early capital carried the team from an idea and a patent filing to a growing preclinical data package and an IRB-approved first-in-human pilot study at Mount Sinai. Just as valuable as the capital: METIS's partners are physicians in the neurosciences, so they understood the clinical problem, and the standard of evidence needed to solve it, from the very first conversation.
Every neurovascular intervention — a stroke thrombectomy, an aneurysm embolization, a diagnostic angiogram — begins at the access site. And how that first stick goes shapes everything downstream: how quickly we reach the brain, whether the artery spasms, whether we're forced into a riskier access route, and how the patient remembers the procedure.
Radial-first medicine has made these procedures safer, but access failure and spasm remain the weak point with no purpose-built solution. Radial artery spasm complicates up to 25% of transradial procedures, causing patient pain, procedural failure, and crossover to femoral access. Despite billions of procedures performed annually, there is no FDA-approved product designed specifically to optimize the vascular access site before needle insertion. Decades of innovation went into seeing the vessel. None went into improving it.
The Enso Vascular Patch delivers a targeted combination of therapeutic agents directly to the access site before needle insertion — designed to dilate the target vessel and calm the skin in a single, non-invasive application. The dual-action formulation is engineered for the specific pharmacological and anatomical requirements of vascular access, reaching pharmacologically relevant concentrations at intradermal and subdermal depths within the time window already built into procedural workflows.
Unlike subcutaneous lidocaine — which is painful, distorts tissue anatomy, and can induce the very vasospasm it aims to prevent — or general topical anesthetics like EMLA that require 60+ minutes and offer no anti-spasm properties, Enso's platform was purpose-built for this moment. A simple apply-and-wait protocol drops into existing workflows with no new training and no additional equipment. One step. Two mechanisms. No needle before the needle.
Provisional patent protection has been filed covering the novel combination formulation, delivery methodology, and specific application at vascular access sites. The development pathway leverages well-characterized active ingredients with established safety profiles, designed to streamline development and reduce clinical risk relative to novel molecular entities.
Amol Mehta, MD — Co-Founder & CEO
Amol is a neuroendovascular surgery fellow at Mount Sinai whose clinical work spans stroke intervention, aneurysm treatment, and cerebral angiography. An author of 30+ peer-reviewed publications, he leads Enso's product, clinical, and regulatory strategy. He started Enso after running into the same gap at the start of nearly every case: no tool existed to prepare the vessel before the needle.
Christopher P. Kellner, MD — Co-Founder
Chris is an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai and Director of its Cerebrovascular Center, and an author of 250+ publications with deep experience in medical-device innovation and clinical trials. He co-founded Enso to bring a builder's mindset to one of medicine's most common — and most overlooked — steps.
Turner Baker — Co-Founder
Turner is a biomedical engineer and medtech venture-builder at Mount Sinai's BioDesign program, where he has led neurosurgical device development and helped translate Mount Sinai research into companies. A device innovator with peer-reviewed work in neurosurgical technology, he drives Enso's operations, business development, and commercialization — turning the science into a company.
Enso's lead program is advancing through formulation development toward the SATORI pilot study — a first-in-human evaluation at an academic medical center in patients undergoing transradial procedures. The trial will assess safety, tolerability, and preliminary efficacy signals, informing a pivotal trial design and FDA pre-submission interactions.
Beyond interventional cardiology, the platform has potential across the full spectrum of vascular access indications: IV placement, dialysis access, and the everyday blood draw. The total addressable market exceeds $6 billion globally, with $1.2 billion in the high-value interventional segment. At modest penetration of the interventional cardiology radial access segment alone, the initial revenue opportunity exceeds $200 million.
