Prytime Medical Devices

Prytime Medical is a small Texas medical device company built around one idea that came directly out of combat casualty care. The technique is REBOA, resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta, in which a balloon catheter is threaded up the femoral artery and inflated to stop blood flow below the point of inflation. It buys time in patients bleeding from injuries inside the torso, where a tourniquet is no use. The underlying work was done by military vascular and trauma surgeons, Colonel Todd Rasmussen and Dr Jonathan Eliason, on lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the company was formed in the early 2010s to commercialise it after the first guidewire-free prototype in 2011. It is privately held and based in Boerne, Texas.

The first product was the ER-REBOA catheter, cleared by the FDA in October 2015 and commercialised in the United States from 2016. Its significance was that it worked without fluoroscopy and without a guidewire, which is what made it usable in an emergency department or a forward surgical setting rather than only an interventional radiology suite. ER-REBOA PLUS followed as an improved version, and the range is sold with convenience kits that bundle the catheter with the access and monitoring items a team needs to place it under time pressure.

The current flagship is pREBOA-PRO, a 7 French compatible catheter cleared in June 2020 and, according to the company, the first and only device cleared by the FDA for partial REBOA. Partial occlusion is the clinically important step. Full occlusion stops the bleeding but starves everything downstream, so the clock on how long it can safely stay inflated is short. Partial occlusion allows some distal flow and stretches that window. A further FDA clearance in 2025 extended the approved occlusion time in zone one to two hours. A flat pack version is sold for constrained storage.

Beyond trauma the company has pushed into obstetric haemorrhage, specifically placenta accreta spectrum and postpartum bleeding, where the same technique can be used as a surgical adjunct. It reported that 54 mothers with placenta accreta related conditions were treated with pREBOA-PRO in 2024. Other uses include interventional radiology procedures and pre-hospital deployment.

Because REBOA is a procedure as much as a product, training is a real part of the business rather than a marketing add-on. The company runs the REBOA Academy, publishes clinical practice guidelines and reimbursement guidance, and sells the ARTI-PRO simulator as a task trainer for catheter placement.

The defense relationship has continued past the original invention. Prytime was selected by the US Army Medical Research and Development Command for an award of close to six million dollars through the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium, took a separate 2.6 million dollar Department of Defense development grant, and the DoD-funded PROMPT study is the first prospective in-human trial of partial REBOA. The devices have been used in conflict settings including Ukraine.