Area teen awarded patent for medical device

CLARKS SUMMIT — At just 17 years old, Manan Pancholy knows the career path he’d like to follow.

Like both of his parents before him, he wishes to be a physician.

And with his first patent – for a cardiac catheter – already published this month, it’s safe to say he’s well on his way to not only achieving that goal, but revolutionizing patient care along the way.

The Abington Heights High School senior has been “shadowing and conducting biomedical research,” in his free time at the Regional Hospital of Scranton with Dr. Nishant Sethi.

“I’ve been very involved with research through Dr. Sethi and Regional as well as through the Sigma Xi Research Honor Society,” Pancholy said.

During one of these shadowing days, Pancholy was observing Sethi in the operating room. Sethi was using a catheter to open a patient’s blood vessel for diagnostic purposes. Catheters, as Pancholy explained, are used for a variety of procedures, diagnostics, and/or intervention and are generally “pretty straight in nature.”

“And so,” Pancholy said, “you’re trying to stick this guide wire in this catheter into a blood vessel that often has a lot of twists and turns … so with that, I noticed there was a lot more difficulty.”

Pancholy applied his physics knowledge from school and realized that by changing the structure of the catheter and how it’s pushed into the blood vessel, the process could be made much easier.

Offering the very example that spurred his idea, he said, “To envision this, say there’s a spiral staircase … and if you stick a ladder through that, it’s not exactly going to work from the top of the stairs to the bottom. But if you make the ladder like a spiral, or even like a carpet, if you make the carpet shaped like a spiral, it’s going to be able to fit down the stairs.”

So Pancholy redesigned the catheter with angles and kinks, like a zigzag or a wave, allowing for the physician to more easily accommodate and navigate the twists and turns within a blood cell, making catheterization procedures much easier for doctor and patient alike.

When it came time to get his new corkscrewing coronary catheter idea patented, Pancholy knew it would be a process. But he also noted that his father, Dr. Samir Pancholy, has 23 of his own patents, so it was game on.

“I had presented my idea to this patent attorney and I was very lucky he took a liking to the idea and helped me move through that process of working with the examiner at the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) and we went from filing the patent to now being published.”

Already an innovator before his 18th birthday or high school graduation, Pancholy hopes to continue that trend into his professional path.

“I aspire to a career in medicine, as a physician, but I want to do more than just help patients at the bedside. I want to also innovate and make medical devices that help in that process,” he said.

His personal motto, he noted, is “I live to lead, serve, teach, and learn from others. And I feel like medicine allows me to employ all those values and really serving others, whether it’s like leading a medical team and serving directly, feeling a patient, teaching and learning constantly through this research process, and teaching people about my device so they could better implement it into patient care.”

Pancholy, who also holds a great interest in bio-statistics as well as medicine, is planning to explore both more in depth in college. While he doesn’t have a number one school of choice, he’s applied to several already such as Brown University, George Washington University and Penn State, all of whom offer DSMB programs that allow accepted high schoolers direct admission into medical school. He’s also applied to several more traditional pre-med programs like Johns Hopkins and University of Pennsylvania.

He offered immense gratitude to the doctors at Regional, such as Sethi and Dr. Deepika Kalisetti, and of course, his parents, the aforementioned Dr. Samir Pancholy and his mother, Dr. Dipti Pancholy.