Inventors at the University of Michigan have secured $11 million to launch Ann Arbor-based HistoSonics, Inc., which will develop a medical device that uses tightly focused ultrasound pulses to treat prostate disease. The company’s histotripsy technology, licensed from U-M and developed by scientists in the departments of biomedical engineering and urology, is a noninvasive, image-guided system that ablates tissue with robotic precision. While most ultrasound products currently on the market use heat to destroy unwanted tissue, histotripsy co-inventor and HistoSonics co-founder Charles Cain, PhD, and colleagues used cavitation — the production of tiny energetic bubbles — to create a surgical scalpel that liquefies tissues without heat. “The conventional wisdom was that cavitation should be avoided, but no one could tell me why,” says Cain. “I decided to study it as a possible mechanism for non-invasive surgery. It works far beyond our expectations, and many people will tell you it’s probably going to revolutionize the way ultrasound therapy is done.” The first clinical application will be treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), a condition that affects more than two million men in the U.S. and results in surgery for some 400,000 BPH patients.