Jeffery Ryan

A salesman turned founder, betting on a rotating blade the width of a catheter

Jeffery Ryan runs Interscope, Inc. from Northbridge, Massachusetts, a small town in the Blackstone Valley that most maps skip past. The company he co-founded is small too, roughly a dozen and a half people. What it makes is not: the EndoRotor System, a mechanical device that lets doctors cut and remove tissue deep inside the body through a flexible endoscope, without using heat. Ryan is the co-founder, president, and chief executive, and for more than a decade the arc of his working life has run parallel to the arc of that single product.

The pitch is narrow and specific, which is how Ryan likes it. Interscope describes itself as pioneering minimally invasive, interventional endoscopic techniques that promote procedural solutions and cost-of-care efficiencies. Translated, that means giving gastroenterologists and pulmonologists a tool that does mechanically what has often required heat, repeated passes, or a trip to open surgery. The EndoRotor's rotating blade cuts tissue that is drawn into the device by suction. No thermal energy, one continuous motion, and the removed tissue can be collected for study.

Ryan did not arrive at medtech by the usual route. Before he sold a single device, he wore a uniform. He served in the United States Air Force and rose to the rank of Captain as a Logistics Readiness Officer, supporting global counterterrorism operations and serving as a Foreign Area Officer overseas. Logistics is an unglamorous word for a demanding job: getting the right things to the right place under pressure, on time, with no room to improvise the supply chain. It is not a bad apprenticeship for someone who would later have to move a Class II medical device through two regulatory systems on two continents.

From direct sales to the founder's chair

After the military, Ryan moved into medical device sales, the part of the industry where you learn what surgeons actually want by standing in the room while they work. He held progressive leadership roles at Smith & Nephew Orthopedics and then Medtronic Surgical Technologies, collecting President's Club and Sales Excellence awards along the way. Fifteen-plus years of that gave him two things a founder needs and rarely has together: a feel for the clinical setting and a feel for the market that pays for it.

In 2013 he put both to use. Ryan co-founded Interscope with Dr. Ramon A. Franco, Jr., a physician who serves as the company's chief scientific officer. The division of labor is the classic one for a device startup that works: a clinician who understands the anatomy and the unmet need, and an operator who understands how to build a business and sell into a conservative market. Ryan took the business seat. He holds a BA from Tufts University in nearby Medford, which keeps his whole story tied to a small stretch of eastern Massachusetts.

How the EndoRotor works

The device is easier to picture than most medtech. Imagine a thin, flexible catheter that runs down the working channel of an endoscope. At the tip is a rotating blade. Suction pulls tissue into the opening; the blade shears it off; the tissue travels back up the catheter and is captured. Because there is no heat involved, there is no thermal damage to the surrounding area, and because it is one motion rather than many small bites, it can be faster in the situations it was built for.

That mechanism opened up a set of hard clinical problems. Interscope has pointed the EndoRotor at the resection of non-lifting and scarred lesions, the removal of residual tissue after endoscopic mucosal resection, and, most notably, walled-off pancreatic necrosis, a serious condition where dead tissue must be cleared. The technique for that last one is called direct endoscopic necrosectomy, and it is exactly the sort of procedure where a purpose-built mechanical tool can matter.

Clearances, and a marathon to get them

The regulatory record is the spine of Interscope's story, and Ryan has spent years building it. The EndoRotor won its CE Mark in Europe in 2016, a milestone Ryan framed around the reality that young companies rarely have resources matched to their ambitions, and that the right partners - in Interscope's case, MassMEP and Boston Engineering - are what let a dream survive a dynamic regulatory environment. In 2017 the system received FDA 510(k) clearance for gastroenterologists to resect and remove residual tissue after endoscopic mucosal resection. In 2019 came further airway clearances, and Interscope raised a Series A that same year.

The headline came in late 2020. Interscope announced that the EndoRotor had received FDA de novo marketing authorization for direct endoscopic necrosectomy - a clearance path reserved for novel devices without an existing equivalent. For a company of Interscope's size, a de novo authorization is an outsized achievement, the kind that usually belongs to firms with many times the headcount.

Scaling through partnership

Days after the de novo news, Interscope announced a distribution partnership with Micro-Tech Endoscopy, an Ann Arbor-based company with the reach to put the device in front of far more physicians than a fourteen-person team ever could on its own. Ryan's comment on the deal reads like a founder who has done the math on scale: a good product without distribution stays a good secret. Pairing Interscope's technology with a larger commercial engine was the practical way to get the EndoRotor into more hands, faster.

That instinct - product plus the right partner - runs through everything Ryan says publicly. He talks less about disruption for its own sake and more about matching needs to resources, which is a logistics officer's way of seeing the world. Build the thing, then solve the harder problem of getting it where it needs to go.

What comes next

Interscope's ambition is stated plainly in its own language: to advance the practice of interventional gastroenterology and pulmonology with minimally invasive tools. For Ryan, that means widening the set of procedures the EndoRotor is trusted for and deepening the base of physicians who reach for it by name. The company remains rooted in Massachusetts, small by headcount and specific by focus, which is a fair description of how Ryan has run it from the start. He is not trying to be everything. He is trying to make one device the obvious choice for a handful of genuinely difficult procedures - and, by the record so far, he has moved it a long way toward that.