Neil Barman

A scalpel made of sound

In July 2025, Sound Blade Medical handed Neil Barman the keys. He'd been the chief operating officer; now he was chief executive. The thing he was being asked to commercialize does not look like surgery. There is no blade. There is no heat. There is a handheld device that fires focused ultrasound into the body and, at the exact point where the beams converge, mechanically liquifies the tissue it's aimed at. The clinical name for this is histotripsy. The everyday version: sound that dissolves what you point it at, and leaves everything around it alone.

That last part is the whole pitch. Conventional ablation burns or freezes, and burning and freezing are blunt. They spread. Histotripsy is non-thermal, which is a technical way of saying it doesn't cook the neighborhood to reach the target. Sound Blade's bet is that you can make this small enough to hold in a hand and precise enough to trust near things you'd rather not damage. Barman's job is to march that bet through clinical development and out the other side as an approved product.

It is a familiar march for him. Barman is a physician who builds the instruments instead of only using them - an M.D. who has spent more than two decades inside early-stage medical-device companies, usually arriving before the science is settled and the regulators have blessed it. The pattern repeats so cleanly it reads like a thesis: get in early, prove the mechanism, win the approval, watch a giant buy the company. Medtronic and Stryker both sit on that list.

A career spent protecting tissue

Start at the beginning, because the through-line is almost too neat. Barman's first medical-device job was at Radiant Medical, working on catheter-based cooling - lowering a patient's temperature to limit the damage a heart attack or stroke does to tissue while the clock runs. The idea then was the same idea now: do less harm to the parts you're not treating.

From there he led the clinical and medical team at Concentric Medical, which built the first FDA-approved line of embolectomy catheters for ischemic stroke - the devices that physically pull a clot out of a blocked vessel. Then came Ardian, where he was an early employee on the senior team. Ardian pioneered catheter-based renal denervation, a way of treating high blood pressure by quieting overactive nerves around the kidneys. Medtronic acquired it in January 2011.

He wasn't done with denervation. As Chief Scientific Officer at ReCor Medical, Barman helped secure the first FDA approval for ultrasound renal denervation therapy - the same nerves, a different energy source, and a regulatory milestone that's genuinely hard to win. Along the way he co-founded May Health, a company developing new treatments for PCOS-related infertility, widening his range beyond the cardiovascular world he'd grown up in.

Read those jobs in order and Sound Blade stops looking like a leap. Cooling to spare tissue. Pulling clots without major surgery. Treating nerves through a catheter instead of an operation. Using ultrasound to do it. Histotripsy is where all four habits meet: ultrasound, precision, non-invasive delivery, and a stubborn insistence on not damaging what you don't have to.

Things that don't fit on a slide