Joe Landolina entered NYU’s InnoVention Competition because the quarterfinalists got free business classes. He was a 17-year-old chemical-engineering student with a peculiar material, a practical co-founder named Isaac Miller, and ambitions that stopped well short of winning. “I didn’t think we’d win,” he later recalled. They won first place. The free classes became irrelevant. The experiment became a company.
This is the sort of opening that founders are usually advised to save for the movie. A teenager grows up near a vineyard, learns chemistry from his grandfather, experiments with plant-derived polymers, and discovers a gel that adheres to tissue. Then come a student competition, a company, a TED stage, and videos watched around the world. Roll credits before anyone asks about sterility protocols.
Landolina’s better story begins after the winning pitch. The chemistry was early. Reliability took years. Cresilon moved from an NYU dorm room to an apartment where the living room was the office and the kitchen was the lab. On Christmas Eve 2013, the founders found an old Brooklyn schoolhouse on Craigslist. Outsourcing the specialized manufacturing was proving impractical, so a company founded around a material began turning itself into a manufacturer.
A childhood with fewer warning labels
Landolina was born in Pine Bush, New York, in 1993. His grandfather had retired from the pharmaceutical industry, bought a vineyard, and built a chemistry lab nearby. Joe describes an education based on doing: experiments first, textbooks later. When his parents placed limits on the more ambitious projects, he went to library books about natural and traditional plant chemistries. One teenage chore was clearing algae from the vineyard ponds. It was inconvenient in the way that useful raw material often is.
His parents also pushed him toward formal lab training. During high school, he spent two summers at Columbia University learning tissue engineering. He arrived at NYU planning to become a surgeon. Back in the vineyard lab, while trying to build a plant-based scaffold, he mixed long-chain sugars derived from algae and got an unexpected result: a material that rapidly reassembled and clung to skin.
The young engineer saw a possible mechanical barrier for bleeding. The important word is mechanical. The material was not imagined as a biological clotting drug; it was designed to flow into an irregular wound and form a barrier. Years later, that underlying platform would support a veterinary product, VETIGEL, and TRAUMAGEL, a 30-milliliter prefilled syringe cleared by the FDA in 2024 for temporary external control of moderate to severe bleeding.
The launch that did not deserve to happen
By 2015, attention was abundant. A TED talk had made the gel easy to understand on a screen. Veterinarians were asking to buy it. Cresilon arranged a launch gathering at Prospect Park Zoo. Then the batches refused to behave. Sometimes the product performed as intended; often, following the same process produced a different result. Sterility tests built for liquids or solids did not neatly fit a gel. Some syringes sent to a partner darkened with contamination after tests had called them sterile.
Landolina cancelled the launch. It is the decisive episode in his career because it contradicts the familiar command to ship and fix later. In medical manufacturing, “later” may arrive after the product has entered a wound. Cresilon brought expertise in-house, developed a new testing protocol, raised more capital, and waited. VETIGEL did not reach the US veterinary market until 2020.
“We didn’t get here by not failing at all.”Joe Landolina
Failure is an overworked word in startup folklore, made cozy by hindsight. This failure was not a clever experiment with a tidy lesson by Friday. It cost years. It also forced the company to acquire capabilities that later became strategic advantages: quality control, process knowledge, and the ability to connect clinical feedback directly to research and production.
The long route to the syringe
The factory is part of the invention
Cresilon now operates 55,000 square feet of production space in Brooklyn. For a medical-device startup, manufacturing in New York is an eccentric choice. For Landolina, it is consistent. He is a lifelong New Yorker and has argued publicly for the city as a place to retain biotech jobs. More importantly, the company’s specialized formulations and processes made separation between research and manufacturing costly in another sense: every handoff risked losing knowledge.
Vertical integration is often described as strategy once it works. Here it began as necessity. The company bought clean rooms, learned production, and accepted the capital burden. Landolina does not prescribe this path to every founder. His rule is to focus on a company’s centers of excellence and find someone better for everything else. Cresilon brought manufacturing inside only after deciding no outside resource could match what the material required.
The shift also changed what counted as engineering. A successful formulation on a bench could no longer be the finish line. The gel had to be filled into syringes, sealed, sterilized, stored, shipped, and produced again with the same behavior. Each verb introduced a new constraint. Landolina has said the engineer in him enjoys control over research, manufacturing, and clinical communication because feedback can move through the whole system. Control, in this context, is less about guarding territory than shortening the distance between a problem in the field and a correction on the floor.
Brooklyn became part of that loop. The factory sits near the people designing the material and the team teaching customers to use it. A city better known for software offices and converted warehouses gained a medical-device production line. Cresilon’s choice is not a universal template; rent and regulation do not become charming because the subway is nearby. But it shows how location can serve the operating model when knowledge needs to travel faster than inventory.
That nuance reveals his operating style. Landolina calls himself “more of a chef than a baker”: analytical, fast, intuitive, inclined to improvise instead of follow the card. Then he hires people who can write the recipe and follow it. In a regulated factory, inspiration without repeatability is merely an expensive anecdote. The inventor needs the process-maker.
“No job is beneath a great leader.”Joe Landolina
He learned the literal version in the old schoolhouse, where leaders helped with the cleaning. His broader advice is to hire for difference rather than resemblance. A persuasive founder does not need a room full of persuasive founders. A gut-driven engineer needs colleagues who slow the decision, document the method, and disagree usefully.
Make the new thing feel familiar
Landolina’s view of commercial adoption is strikingly unromantic. A useful device can still fail if it disrupts how customers work. The clinician, the economic buyer, and the patient each experience the product differently. The founder’s job is not only to demonstrate that the technology works. It is to reduce the friction between the technology and an established routine.
Landolina’s adoption loop
Cresilon applied that principle with a limited commercial release of TRAUMAGEL to 12 EMS agencies and trauma hospitals before expanding nationally. The company could observe use in real emergencies, refine training, and gather evidence without confusing a loud launch for a finished product. In January 2025, after FDA clearance the previous August, Cresilon announced nationwide availability.
Clear communication has produced its own surprising returns. A short visual demonstration made the material legible far beyond a laboratory. After a late-night television appearance, a Walter Reed researcher contacted Landolina the next day. That introduction grew into research on another potential use of Cresilon’s gel platform. The episode sounds lucky, and it was. Luck still needed a 22-second explanation it could understand.
Ambition at the speed of evidence
In April 2026, Landolina described a company operating across three continents, with TRAUMAGEL adopted by more than 150 EMS and trauma systems in 25 states. Cresilon’s ambitions extend to additional trauma-care and surgical applications. Its route forward remains the one its founder learned the expensive way: validate, fit the workflow, train the people, then scale.
He has also become wary of synthetic urgency. His favorite deal advice is to sleep on an offer: if it vanishes by morning, it was not worth taking. It is an unexpectedly calm principle from someone who started a company before he could legally order a drink. Yet it fits the record. The teenager supplied curiosity and nerve. The executive had to learn patience.
The gel’s appeal is speed. Landolina’s achievement is accepting how slowly speed must be built. A material can reassemble in seconds; a trustworthy product requires the factory, the protocol, the regulator, the instructor, and the medic opening a kit under pressure. The shortcut only becomes real after someone has walked the long way around.