About KCBioMedix®
KC BioMedix, Inc. is an early stage medical device company focused on developing and commercializing products that are used by neonatal healthcare providers to assess and treat the problem of incompetent feeding in premature infants. With over 500,000 infants born prematurely in the U.S. each year, and as many as half suffering from the inability to adequately breast or bottle feed, there is a compelling need for accelerating the healthy development of oral feeding skills. Delayed development leads to extended stays in the hospital neonatal intensive care unit, creating a substantial medical, economic, and emotional burden on hospitals, patients and their families.
Our first product, the NTrainer System®, enables caregivers to better manage this problem by providing a standardized assessment tool to measure Nonnutritive Suck (NNS) performance. NNS is an essential neurological building block in an infant’s coordination of sucking, swallowing and breathing - a capability required for independent oral feeding. Our system also provides a clinically proven ororhythmic stimulation therapy to reinforce NNS. Ororhythmic stimulation has been demonstrated to accelerate and achieve full oral feeding 7 days sooner (1). Once healthy premature infants have achieved the ability to feed independently, they can be discharged from the neonatal ICU and sent home.
The NTrainer was invented by Dr. Steven Barlow, Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing and Neuroscience, and Director of the Communication Neuroscience Laboratories at the University of Kansas, and Don Finan, PhD, Assistant Professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the University of Colorado. The NTrainer System is the culmination of more than 15 years of collaboration with physicians, engineers and developmental physiologists to produce a technology that could both measure and treat obstacles to the development of the infant brain.
“A baby’s ability to suck is about more than getting nourishment,” according to Dr. Barlow.
“This motor behavior generates sensory flow that nurtures the brain
to form and strengthen nerve connections and pathways.”
(1) “Effect of an oral simulation program on sucking skill maturation of preterm infants” Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology 2005,47:158-162 (S Fucile MSc, EG Gisel PhD, C Lau PhD)
Trademarks
The following trademarks are registered trademarks of KC BioMedix, Inc - NTrainer System®, NTrainerRT®, NeoSuckRT® and STI NNS Index®.
All other trademarks appearing on the Site are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Patents Pending