Success story of GrOwnValve GmbH: A prosthetic heart valve for adults and children, made from the patient’s own tissue, a replacement heart valve that lasts a lifetime

Project details

Acronym: GrOwnValve
Title: A prosthetic heart valve for adults and children, made from the patient’s own tissue, a replacement heart valve that lasts a lifetime
Company: GrOwnValve GmbH
Project manager: Dr. Boris Schmitt
Funding instrument: EIC Accelerator
Duration: 36 months, April 2022 – March 2025
Budget: 3.617.625,00 Euro

Our company

GrOwnValve GmbH was founded in 2019 by pediatric cardiologist Dr. Boris Schmitt and entrepreneur Jasper Emeis to bring an endogenous heart valve to the market for the treatment of children and adults.

Every year, 400,000 children worldwide are born with congenital heart valve defects. In industrialized countries, one in eight healthy people will have a heart valve problem in the course of their lives. GrOwnValve is committed to providing needs-oriented care for these patients.

Our innovation

With the help of a new patent-pending procedure from GrOwnValve Innovation, cardiologists can produce an autologous implant for affected patients. Within two hours, an individual heart valve can be produced for each patient during a single procedure in the operating room and inserted minimally invasively via a cardiac catheter. After a short time, the patient can leave the hospital with their own, long-lasting and growing 'GrOwnValve'. The procedure leaves no visible scar and no medication is required.

Following successful in-vitro and in-vivo tests, GrOwnValve has now sought approval for the first clinical trial in Germany. This is the first step towards treating the 400,000 children worldwide with heart valve defects and the significantly higher number of adults who, by using the body's own material for the new heart valve, are spared the major surgical procedure that heart valves made from foreign tissue have entailed up to now. A safe and personalized treatment option for heart valve diseases can improve the lives of millions of patients worldwide. However, this can also save immense costs in the healthcare systems.

Our motivation for the EIC Accelerator

As an emerging biomedical company, GrOwnValve strives to bring its personalized heart valve implants to the market, offering a safe and effective alternative to conventional heart valve implants.

The EIC Accelerator offers us the unique opportunity to develop our product pipeline in just one major financing step and to continue building the company towards market maturity.

In addition to access to financial resources, we also benefit from the mentoring and the many opportunities the EIC program offers to network with other leading companies and experts in our field. This support has allowed us to expand our team and accelerate our research and development to bring our personalized heart valve implants to market faster.

Our motivation for applying to the EIC Accelerator fit very well with the profile and objectives of the program. The funding will enable us to bridge the gap from the laboratory and preclinical trials to our first patients in the clinic.