Building a Consumer-Focused Medtech Business

Jennifer Ernst, Co-founder and CEO of bioelectronic medicine company Tivic Health, didn’t follow a traditional path to the medtech industry.

Her career began in computing, as a communications manager and business development director at Xerox PARC, before becoming Chief Strategy Officer for Norwegian electronics manufacturing company Thin Film Electronics.

But then the field of bioelectronic medicine caught her eye. She knew this was an area where her experience in translational science — taking groundbreaking research and turning it into a commercial product — would make a difference.

“It’s really an exploding area in science. I was incredibly drawn to it in part because of how little is actually known about how the electrical system of the body works,” Jennifer says.

In 2016, she and biomedical engineer and inventor John Claude founded Tivic Health with the goal of developing advanced bioelectronic solutions that treat disease, increase wellness, and improve lives.

Their flagship product is ClearUP, an over-the-counter handheld device that uses gentle pulsed electron waves to relieve symptoms of sinus and nasal inflammation, nasal allergies, sinus infections, chronic sinusitis, cold, and flu.

The device received FDA clearance in early 2019 and entered the market later that same year. Tivic has since sold more than 30,000 units of ClearUP.

“It’s been a pretty fast, rapid and exciting journey from concept through commercialization now to actually providing our investors liquidity and having the opportunity to grow the company in the space of bioelectronic medicine to a multi-product company,” Jennifer says.

In this episode of Medsider, Jennifer shares how consumers can play a key role in boosting support and evidence for over-the-counter medical devices, and why she thinks direct-to-consumer business models will transform the medtech space.