catheter

Invention: Vascular Pathways
Inventor: Amir Belson
Cost: $600,000
Time: 6 years
Is It Ready Yet? 1 2 3 4 5

When Amir Belson flew from Israel for a pediatric fellowship at Stanford University in 1998, he carried a list of 64 ideas for medical inventions. Many of the concepts were influenced by the years he served as a flight surgeon in the Israeli air force, while others came from time spent in a neonatal intensive-care unit. One of them was an idea for a better intravenous catheter, one that wouldn’t damage veins or kink inside of them. By 2005, he had made his first prototype.