Circ Medtech
Preventing HIV through non-surgical male circumcision
- Company
- Healthcare
- East Africa
- 2011
- Exited
The challenge
Adult male circumcision (MC) is proven to reduce lifetime risk of HIV infection by 50 to 71%. In 2007, the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS began advocating for male circumcision as an effective means of HIV prevention. Governments are struggling to provide a safe, accessible, and cost-effective procedure for adult MC. Surgical methods are intrusive difficult to scale, requiring highly skilled medical cadres and expensive materials and infrastructure – all difficult to access in areas of highest need.
The innovation
Circ MedTech has developed the PrePex device – a safe, simple, and scalable methodology for administering adult MC. The device is easily and safely removed within a week, and patients’ daily routines go uninterrupted during the whole procedure. The procedure is non-surgical, completely bloodless, and requires no injected anesthesia, no knives, no sutures, and no sterile settings. It can be administered by even minimally-skilled healthcare workers in resource-limited settings.