Why Urinary Retention in Women Hasn’t Changed in Decades—and What’s Finally ChangingIn a recent episode of Life Sciences Decoded, I spoke with Kevin Connolly, CEO and founder of Vesiflo, about why this problem has persisted—and what it takes to finally change it.
Full InterviewWe’ve made extraordinary advances in medicine—from breakthrough vaccines to AI-driven diagnostics. And yet, for women living with urinary retention, the standard of care hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades. For many, daily catheterization remains the only option. It’s not just inconvenient—it’s a chronic burden that comes with infection risk, quality of life challenges, and long-term complications.
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Key Insights From Our Conversation
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What is Urinary Retention?
(1 minute listen) Vesiflo's Mission
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It's interesting because everybody hears about urinary incontinence, right? Leaking and, and such. But retention is the opposite. Imagine not being able to urinate. It's a very serious medical condition. When it happens to women on a chronic basis, it's typically the result of neurologic disease or injury.
Think MS, stroke, spinal cord injuries, spina bifida, that sort of thing. And because it's of neurologic origin, it's permanent. Right now their only medical option is the use of urinary catheters, despite the fact that everyone knows they cause life-threatening infections and they make life generally miserable. I started this company for a reason, which is in inFlow has the potential to save thousands of women's lives every year by keeping them from getting infected.
A lot of the UTIs that they get from catheters, some of them are gonna go septic and kill them. And I didn't feel like there was anything that I was gonna do likely in my career that would have that kind of impact. So basically, we have hung in there and battled and we are finally with a support of our medical society, the patient advocacy groups, and all the physician experts finally about to launch in the United States. |
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About the technology: inFlow
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So the problem with catheters is that they're simply tubes and they passively drain urine, whereas normal urination is an active process. So inFlow attempts to simulate normal urination, and in this case, since the bladder, which is a muscle, the detrusor doesn't function, it can't force urine out. So we are pumping it out.
So what we do is we insert an intraurethral valve and pump, and the way it works is there's a magnetic control with one button. When the patient pushes that one button, the magnet spins at 10,000 RPM. There's a small magnet inside the device and attach to that magnet is a plastic rotor. When those magnets couple and that rotor assembly spins a 10,000 RPM, it evacuates urine at a normal flow rate. So we are in fact mimicking normal urination. When the user is done, she lets go of the button, the magnet a automatically counter spins and engages a valve so that she doesn't leak, and it's very safe and it's very small, it's very discreet. So with the inflow, a woman can sit in a normal toilet and she can urinate in a normal length of time, and she's unlikely to get infected. |