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Startup inspired by a childhood health scare sells for $275M

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A teenage health scare led Surbhi Sarna to fight back in the most unique way. As a 13-year-old doing her homework, Surbhi felt a severe pain lash at one side of her body. The pain was so severe that she blacked out. Later doctors told her that it was a complex ovarian cyst which could be a possible cancer. As it turned out, it was not cancer but, it changed young Surbhi’s life goals.

She set out on a quest to help detect ovarian cancer for other women. This led Sarna, now 32, to found a company, nVision Medical in California and to raise $17 million in venture capital. She also gained approval of the Food and Drug Administration to develop a specialized device for detecting ovarian cancer.

Though device is not for sale yet, Boston Scientific, a medical device giant has come forward to buy nVision for $150 million upfront and another $125 million to be paid if certain clinical and commercial milestones are hit over the next four years. Sarna, who was on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 In Healthcare list in 2014, will stay with the company.

“I did not start this company because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I was looking for some concept,” says Sarna. “I did not start this company because I wanted to be a CEO or I wanted to be in charge. Those were all necessary things that I needed to do to get this product to where it needed to go. Now, this is the best place for me to be in order to keep seeing that happen.”

The market opportunity for the device could be from $500 million to $2 billion annually, says David Pierce, an executive vice president at Boston Scientific and president of the company’s MedSurg division. Some 300,000 women have their ovaries removed each year, he says, mostly because they either have suspicious masses on them or because they carry a version of the BRCA gene that makes them very likely to develop cancer. The nVision device aims to give doctors a way to watch for cancer in these patients.

Sarna is the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her mother is a PhD in Hindi Literature who stayed home to raise her children. Her father, an engineer, worked in a series of startups. She founded nVision straight out of college in 2009, continuing to work day jobs in the medical device industry. Her husband is an entrepreneur whose startup recently raised $60 million.

The beginning was tough, she had few connections and often met with deaf ears. “I’ve been in several boardrooms with all male VCs who are like, ‘Oh! This is a women’s issue,” she says.

After a year and a half, she managed to raise $250,000. Her biggest backer was Darshana Zaveri, a woman who was a partner at Catalyst Health Ventures. Sarna hired her boss at her last medical device job to get things moving. Together they faced huge challenges but, continued.

Though it is not in the public domain yet, but, the two have come up with a balloon, which  follows the path up the Fallopian tube as it is inflated and collects the cells that are on its surface. nVision conducted an initial 40-woman study to see if it could get the balloon into the Fallopian tube. They conducted another 40-woman study to prove that it could enter the full length of the tube and collect cells. A third study of woman who were having their ovaries removed compared the results of looking at the cells with the pathology reports on the ovaries to see if it could detect cancer. The results have not been published yet, but it is believed that the test had high sensitivity and specificity. Contractually, the outside doctors who conducted the research have the right to be the first to release the results.

As nVision’s product moved forward, investors became more interested. Sarna remembers  sitting down with a team from Boston Scientific at a medical meeting in Las Vegas several years ago. It was the end of the day, and they were all tired, but she remembers the team’s excitement. “You know when someone just really gets something and understands it right away?” she says. “It was awesome.”

Last summer potential acquirers started expressing interest in the company. Sarna says she was in no hurry. Half her series B had not been spent, and Arboretum had set aside cash for another investment round. Boston Scientific was another potential buyer. But, the meetings went so well that, at one point in negotiations, Sarna told a Boston Scientific executive: “Hey. My team really likes your team.” She says she was thrilled that Boston is the company acquiring nVision.

The challenge now will be convincing women and their doctors that it really is safe to watch for cancer using nVision’s test. Boston Scientific plans a larger, 120-patient study. But Sarna says that women are already in a position of waiting and watching, and choosing to balance the health costs of removing their ovaries and going into early menopause and sacrificing some of their childbearing years with the risk of cancer. She says she wants to give them a better option than existing diagnostics, which she scoffs are no better than flipping a coin.

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