How this doctor invented the Band-Aid for nosebleed emergencies: ‘We didn’t have anything to give patients’

Dr. Elizabeth Clayborne founded a medical device called NasaClip after her residency in Washington, D.C. in 2015. Clayborne was surprised to find a growing number of people coming to the emergency room (ER) with nosebleeds during her residency as medical professionals consider that a “lower acuity issue”, she told Afrotech.

In her quest to find ways to help people with the medical condition, she realized technology could bridge the gap. This led her to create NasaClip in 2015 after her residency. She launched to market its prototype, known as the Band-Aid for nosebleeds, in subsequent years.

“The problem was we didn’t have anything to give patients in the waiting room… something to stop their nose bleeding,” Clayborne said during an interview with Afrotech. “So, I was always taping together tongue depressors to make a clip. And I realized like, ‘Why am I doing this? Why do I have to maneuver together some contraption to stop a nosebleed? There should be a device that helps people treat nosebleeds and probably could avoid the ER visit altogether if they had this tool.’ And that is where the idea was born when I was a resident and thinking about it.”

Clayborne embarked on her entrepreneurial journey with no business background. While developing her medical device, she kept the process on hold until after the pandemic when she participated in the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), a venture fund for early-stage businesses in Maryland.

Clayborne’s participation in TEDCO helped her to obtain capital to create a prototype. “[TEDCO] gave me not only my first capital but also some of the support and advisors I would need to understand how to build a team, fundraise, and take the next steps towards making this a product that could reach market, and it was scary,” she said. “It was scary for me to let go of my very traditional academic emergency medicine path. Those of us who went into medicine spent a long time going to school and training to be a practicing clinician. And for me, fortunately, because I’m an ER doc and we work shifts, I still can practice, and it keeps me grounded and also keeps me aware of problems related to nosebleeds and other issues. So, I still practice and I love that I get to do that.”

The medical officer is now working assiduously to get her products to people in urgent cares, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, and industries, such as sports medicine, aviation, and the cruise industry. She is also focused on developing a reusable version of the NasaClip, which will be available on Amazon later this year. So far, NasaClip has raised $3.5 million, and 70% of the company’s funding has come from Black angel investors.

Clayborne grew up in Denver. A Duke University undergraduate, she designed her own Medical Ethics and Religion major. Before going to medical school, she completed a two-year research fellowship at National Institutes of Health in the Social and Behavioral Research Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute with a research focus on race, ethnicity and genetics, according to her bio.