Dr. Jonathan Isaacs, a surgeon and researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University, invented a medical device that is revolutionizing surgeries and improving lives. Yet he will never become ultra-wealthy from his creation, he said.
Isaacs invented Nerve Tape, which binds together broken nerves better than previous methods. Though the product was his idea, he doesn’t own the company that sells it or the patent behind the technology. VCU licensed the right to make and sell Nerve Tape to an Atlanta-based firm called BioCircuit Technologies. For every sale, BioCircuit pays a royalty to VCU, and the university shares a percentage with Isaacs.
“With the royalties I’m getting, I will visit an island,” he said. But the inventor fortunate enough to create a startup company and sell it is the one who hits the jackpot. That inventor, Isaacs said, “owns an island.”
When inventing a new product, VCU inventors must consider how much they are willing to risk and how big a reward they want to pursue. Inventing a medical device can require a decade of work and millions of dollars in costs to complete clinical trials and gain approval from regulators. Plus, many researchers are not interested in becoming CEOs on top of their day jobs. And through it all, they must strive to beat the odds. Most ideas do not become marketable products.
So inventors like Isaacs seek financial help from an outside firm. In exchange, the company purchases a license to sell the invention and keep much of the revenue. VCU and the inventor earn a portion of the sales in the form of a royalty.
But others take a potentially more lucrative path, like Perfusion Medical, a startup created by a VCU researcher. If Perfusion’s medicine is a success, it might sell for $1 billion, said Gerard Eldering, the startup’s CEO.
Nerve tape took years to generate revenue
Isaacs, an orthopedic hand surgeon and inventor of Nerve Tape, started developing his breakthrough product 15 years ago: a small piece of pig intestine — manufactured by the bioscience division of Virginia-based Smithfield Foods — with metal hooks embedded to its surface. After a patient suffers damage to a peripheral nerve, the doctor wraps the tape around the broken nerve, which starts to regrow, allowing the patient to regain feeling.
Since last year, doctors have used the product for patients with traumatic injuries, such as falls or gun shots, and for women who had mastectomies and lost sensation in their chests. More successful than the previous method of sewing together broken nerves, Nerve Tape was an immediate success, selling more than 7,000 units since last year.
Every time BioCircuit sells the device, it pays a royalty to VCU, and VCU passes on 40% to the inventor. Both the company and university declined to say how much VCU has earned in royalties. In the field of medical inventions, royalty payments are often less than than 10% of net sales. From all of its inventions, VCU collected $4.3 million in licensing and royalty revenue in fiscal 2024.
VCU inventions
$4.3 million – licensing and royalty revenue VCU collected in fiscal 2024, the most of any Virginia college. The university gave 40% back to inventors.
8 – new startups formed by VCU researchers in fiscal 2024.
$568 million – what VCU spent on research in fiscal 2025, roughly twice as much as it spent five years earlier.
When inventors license their creations, the inventor often receives just a fraction of the revenue. Sometimes that is the only path to success. It would have been difficult for Isaacs to try to build Nerve Tape on his own, he said. BioCircuit’s founder, Isaac Clements, worked for a decade alongside Isaacs to determine the size and number of hooks. The company contributed financial support, completed the work of seeking a patent, markets the product and hired distributors.
“At some point, you have to say, ‘I’m going to bring in more people,’” Isaacs said. “My slice of the pie obviously gets smaller, but the pie gets made, and the pie is a lot bigger.”
The other road an inventor can take, creating a startup company, typically requires attracting investors. But investors usually will not buy into an idea that will not generate revenue for 10 years, said Dawson Reimer, a consultant to BioCircuit.
Some inventors see licensing their invention to another company as letting someone else raise their child. Isaacs said he doesn’t see it that way – he considers BioCircuit his partner. Plus, he never wanted to become a business executive.
“For me, I like being a surgeon,” he said. “I didn’t want to look at life and say I wanted to be CEO of a business I made myself.”
Developing a vaccine would be costly on its own
Another VCU inventor, Rich Marconi, invented a vaccine to prevent Lyme disease in dogs called crLyme. It hit the market in 2016 and became the most popular vaccine of its type. Dogs across the country have received hundreds of millions of doses, and the vaccine has become VCU’s best-selling product.
An animal health care company, Zoetis, helped support the vaccine’s design and purchased the license to make and sell the shot, and VCU owns the patent behind the technology. Typically, researchers at VCU must agree to let the university hold the patent. In exchange, VCU provides lab space and covers the high cost of applying for the patent.
Though Marconi declined to say how much his invention has earned him, he said the vaccine has changed his life, both financially and personally. The invention has taken him out of his lab — which can be a solitary career — and led him to speak at hundreds of seminars to market and explain the product to veterinarians, leading him to meet new people and travel the globe.
“It’s very rewarding to reap the benefits of a successfully developed product,” he said.
Creating his own startup company to build and sell crLyme would have been very expensive, Marconi said – the vaccine required testing and approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s why he has no regrets having chosen the licensing route. Like other inventors, Marconi is more interested in researching new products than becoming a CEO.
“When we develop one, we want to hand it off so we can move on to the next one,” Marconi said. “Our strength here is the science.”
A big bet on stopping blood loss
The alternative path to building up an invention, by creating a startup, is more risky. Medical inventions often require years of clinical trials and approvals from the Food and Drug Administration.
But if all the pieces come together, the inventor can strike big. An Australian drug maker recently completed a deal in which it bought medicines comparable to Perfusion Medical’s invention for $1 billion each.
Perfusion Medical’s story started in 2010 when VCU’s Martin Mangino received a grant from the Department of Defense to study ways to slow massive blood loss after a traumatic injury. When the body loses blood, cells fill with water and pinch closed blood vessels. But Mangino discovered that a molecule called polyethylene glycol, or PEG-20k, stops the cells from swelling, allows blood to flow and increases amount of time a patient can survive.
After tests on animals yielded positive results, around 2020, he brought on Gerard Eldering, who has years of experience building startups, to become the company’s CEO. Few scientific researchers have the time and energy to successfully run their own startups, Eldering said. They already have classes to teach and cannot devote the time to launch a startup, which includes networking, traveling to conferences and talking up the invention. The business world moves faster than academia and requires more risk-taking than many scientists are prepared for.
“Real entrepreneurship, really diving in, taking risk, is one of those activities where for everyone who talks about it, 10% actually do it,” Eldering added.
Together, Eldering and Mangino started a C corporation registered in Delaware, attracted $7 million in new government funding and brought on investors, who put another $3 million into company coffers. VCU also owns a portion of the startup.
Perfusion contracted with a drug manufacturer in Detroit to make the medicine, and it hired outside labs to conduct studies. It now has six employees of its own, who manage grants, federal regulations, plans for clinical trials and the contractors. It hopes to start testing on humans early next year.
And one day, Perfusion hopes to sell itself to a pharmaceutical giant, Eldering said. That’s the only way it can make enough medicine to reach all the patients who need it.
“I like to joke, I want to sit on my catamaran that I paid for with equity in Perfusion Medical,” Eldering said. “But I want to sit there thinking that people’s lives were saved.”
© 2025 Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.. Visit www.timesdispatch.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
