Think Big, Start Small, and Prioritize Ruthlessly

Harlee Sorkin is a co-founder of Common Place Holdings, a venture studio that has given birth to eight different medtech startups, including InterShunt, which Harlee is leading as its CEO today. Prior to that, Harlee proved his business acumen by leading Traco Labs to a successful exit.

But Harlee's more than a business wiz. He was a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, dabbling in both engineering and medicine despite not being an engineer or a physician himself. There, his area of focus was translational research — marrying ideas and concepts with real-world applications.

A few years back, one of the startups Common Place was nurturing, InterShunt, reached a pivotal moment that demanded more attention from the team. So, Harlee left his seat in academia to lead the charge full-time.

InterShunt is tackling one of the most pressing issues in medicine: heart failure. When the heart muscles weaken, they struggle to pump enough blood to the body. This leads to increased pressure within the left ventricle, and if not corrected, could result in symptoms like pulmonary congestion and shortness of breath. This slow, degenerative condition affects over 6 million Americans every year.

The solution InterShunt is developing is based on a concept from over a century ago, where a French physician noticed that patients with a naturally occurring hole in their heart experienced less severe heart failure symptoms. InterShunt built upon this foundation to develop interatrial shunting.

Their flagship product is a proprietary transcatheter system aimed to replicate this natural phenomenon. There have been previous attempts to employ this same concept, however they all involved stents or tissue fixation by creating a ring of scar tissue to maintain a durable opening. InterShunt’s approach is much simpler: punching a hole in the heart that creates a pathway for blood to bypass the congested areas. The fact that it requires no implants or stents, eschewing the need for hardware in the heart, makes it a potentially safer, more compliant solution. “By creating that pathway, we leave the septum in a completely compliant state where it can respond to the hemodynamic needs of the heart,” Harlee explains. 

As the idea and the concept of InterShunt grew, the team decided to move to a more conducive environment for its next phase of development, landing in Minneapolis. The pre-clinical phase included extensive animal studies and cadaver work with first-in-human studies conducted in the Republic of Georgia in early 2022. They involved 10 patients, and the follow-up results, presented at the TCT conference in October 2023, showed all patients maintaining a durable opening, an encouraging sign for the future of heart failure treatment.

Harlee is now eyeing the next big step for InterShunt. “In order to generate a heart failure claim, we do expect to have to perform a pivotal study of our own in a heart failure population,” he shares, revealing the roadmap ahead.

Key Learnings From Harlee’s Experience

• You have to prioritize ruthlessly during the capital-scarce initial phases of your startup. It’s a cycle of setting and achieving milestones that prove potential and help you secure further capital so you can move on with your next goals.

• Reframe fundraising as friend-raising. Begin cultivating these relationships well before you need the capital, as this process can be time-consuming. Align your funding requests with clear, achievable milestones and choose the right investors for each stage of your company.

• Engage openly and frequently with a diverse range of stakeholders. Don’t be afraid of people stealing your idea; it doesn’t happen as often as one might think. Treat every conversation as an opportunity to learn and refine your ideas and you’ll end up with a wealth of perspectives and insights.