WEST CALDWELL TWP.—According to local inventor and doctor Boris Reydel, colonoscopies just got a whole lot less uncomfortable.
Reydel has pioneered the Vizballoon, a strikingly simple balloon shaped device attached to the end of a colonoscope that independent research has found reduces discomfort very significantly, in addition to other benefits, and ”could become a future standard for screening colonoscopy.”
Reydel has had an unusual life beginning right at childhood. He was born in Russia, in 1959, at the height of the Cold War, a place he called incomparable to the United States.
“Not everybody had a TV in my time, almost nobody could go outside the country for say vacation,” he said. “In my time there were shortages of food actually, you would stay in line to get a kielbasa.”
After a childhood in Moscow, Reydel graduated from Moscow Medical Institute with a medical degree, before immigrating to the United States at age 25. According to Reydel, that was not an insignificant feat for someone with his background.
“Only 26 Jews left in March 1986,” Reydel said.
In 1990, Reydel gained acceptance into John Hopkins GI Fellowship, fending off 1,220 applicants for a spot.
“That’s where I had in interest in entrepreneurship. I never knew it,” he said.
Reydel began his career anxious to start solving oncology problems, but was told he needed to adjust his expectation.
“I was immediately told, that I would have to work first 15 years in someone else’s lab,” Reydel said.
So Reydel joined a practice, and still sees patients full-time today.
He’s been innovating the whole time.
In the dot.com boom, he came up with a concept to unite inventors and companies, for a fee, on a website. Later, he designed an anti-constipation prototype.
“I found that my patient would improve bowel capability if they sat on the toilet like this,” he said, stretching his arms upward.
So he created an adjustable towel hanger which surreptitiously doubled as a constipation reliever.
Reydel’s first commercially developed device, called Tiger Naso-Jejunal Tube, is a feeding tube that goes beyond the stomach without an expensive operation.
“You have differential coefficient of a friction, going in easy like an arrowhead, going backwards is a little more difficult. So every peristaltic wave to grab the tube and push it,” he said.
VizBalloon is Reydel’s newest innovation, and seems likely to go the furthest.
Currently, doctors see inside the colon during colonoscopies by pumping in air and water, creating space between the camera lens and intestinal wall.
“Pumping it full of air elongates the anatomy, making it longer to go up the colon,” Reydel said. “Imagine that you are doing four colonoscopies. The first three are easy, the fourth one was very twisted, banged, buckled, and this, and that, so you spend 30 minutes instead of five minutes going to the end of the colon.”
Reydel said the pressure mounts during problem procedures.
“Someone behind them is scheduled, and you feel nervous, and you don’t have enough time on the way out, and you kind of quickly withdraw,” he said.
Reydel said that this scenario compromises doctors ability to spot polyps.
Other problems he cites with current treatments are high discomfort for the patient and perforation risk.
“Two years ago in Rome, there was another patient who had 24 attempts at colonoscopy, they never reached the end because of the complicated anatomy of the patient’s colon,” Reydel said. “So, what’s the solution? You create a space between the lens and the object you look at.”
Instead of accomplishing this by expanding the intestines with air, Reydel’s Vizballoon, a local attachment on the end of the colonoscope, comes into play.
Reydel says that this shortens the ‘ingress’ time to extend the colonoscope up the colon by forty to fifty percent.
“My technique makes pain maybe five time less,” he said.
Vizballoon has succesfully found a manufacturer, has gone through the regulatory process, and is now ready to go.
“I think I am going to go day by day and see, try to make it as widely available as possible,” Reydel said.
