Eight Years from Observation to Patent: How TTP Came Into Being

I come from investment, not medicine. Twenty years in healthcare finance teaches you to look for the gap between what a problem costs and what it would cost to solve it. When Jeremy Mauger described what he was watching happen to patients on cold, hard scoop stretchers with multiple transfers between trolleys — core temperatures dropping during transfer, clotting systems already failing by the time they reached the resuscitation room — the gap was obvious. The clinical evidence was there. The engineering solution was buildable. Nothing existed. The question was why not, and whether that could be changed.

The problem was not scientific. It was structural. And structural problems, with enough sustained effort, can be fixed.

The Observation That Started Everything

Jeremy had spent years watching a pattern he found deeply troubling: patients arriving at hospital colder than they should, the lethal triad — hypothermia, coagulopathy, acidosis — already building during transfer. The scoop stretcher is hard and cold. Clothing is cut away. Fluids are cold. Each clinical intervention, correctly applied, accelerates heat loss. Nobody had redesigned the transfer system itself because nobody had the market position to commission a device that spanned pre-hospital and hospital environments.

That observation became the founding specification for ThermoTraumaPort. Not a research brief. Not a market analysis. A clinician saying: this is what I see on every shift, and this is what a device would need to do to address it. The patient should remain on a single warming, pressure-distributing surface from the point of injury through to theatre — no handovers between cold surfaces, continuous temperature maintenance. Simple in principle. Eight years in practice.

What Eight Years Actually Looks Like

The first years were about validation and funding. NIHR support made the early clinical development possible — without it, the project would not have survived the distance between prototype and manufacturable device. Angel investment from business angel friends, Oxford Technology Fund and Anglia Capital Group, through a £250,000 SEIS-eligible round, bridged the gap to a device we could actually build at scale. Both were hard-won. Both required sustained relationship-building that consumed time we would rather have spent on the device. Foutunately we obtained matched funding from New Anglia Capital, a fund that matches investment by Norfolk/sufffolk-base angels.

The regulatory pathway ran in parallel and across two jurisdictions. TTP spans pre-hospital and hospital settings — a boundary that is clinically arbitrary but administratively significant. Navigating EU and UK requirements while simultaneously mapping an FDA pathway for US military customers was not a task we could delegate. It required us to understand systems in all jurisdictions well enough to identify where they aligned and where they created contradictions. That knowledge now lives in the company. It was expensive to acquire.

The milestone: ThermoTraumaPort is now patented in the United States and Europe. It launched at SOMA — the Special Operations Medical Association conference — in May 2025 and is preparing for deployment with US military customers. The military-grade battery meets MIL-PRF-32052/1 specification. The device is FDA 510(k)-exempt.

What the System Required of Us

TTP predates EAAA's RAID research infrastructure. We built it without the formal support mechanisms that now exist — on individual clinical observation, sustained institutional will from EAAA medics, and a small team that stayed aligned across nearly a decade of incremental progress while the problem we set out to solve continued to harm patients.

That is not a complaint. It is a description of what the current system requires. Every stage of the translation pipeline — NIHR applications, ethics approvals, regulatory submissions, manufacturing partnerships, investor due diligence, procurement conversations — is legitimate. Each is necessary. Together they created a timeline in which eight years was a successful navigation, not a failure.

The next device to address a problem like this should take eighteen months. The patients who need it should not have to wait for the difference. That argument — about what it would take to compress this timeline, and what it costs in human terms when we don't — is the subject of the conversation at the Frontline Club on 26 May.

Frontline Innovation: Medical Evacuation — 26 May 2026, Frontline Club, London

The clinicians, investors, and innovators behind ThermoTraumaPort will be discussing what the eight-year journey produced — and what it will take to do it faster. Tickets: eventbrite.co.uk/e/frontline-innovation-medical-evacuation-tickets-1986009124754

About the Author

Mary Anne Cordeiro is Founder and CEO of ThermoTraumaPort. She has led TTP's clinical and commercial development over seven years, drawing on twenty years of experience in healthcare investment and fifteen years in international corporate finance. ThermoTraumaPort is patented in the US and Europe and is preparing for deployment with US military customers.

lsngroup.org/blog · Part of the From Helicopter to Hospital series