Meet Emergency Dermal Solutions
Meet SCAPE Company Emergency Dermal Solutions. Born out of the extreme need for a better burn care solutions, this local firefighter/paramedic took his depth of expertise to the test. Learn more about his medical device solutions and how you can help with his immediate needs of grant funding, warehousing, and government contracts.
Q: What’s your name, title, company
A: Stuart Buergler, Managing Partner, Emergency Dermal Solutions
Q: What does your company do?
A: Our goal is to introduce superior medical devices into the emergency medicine/military medicine industries for burn injuries and hazardous materials exposure. The current standard of care is clunky, inefficient, and hurts as much as it helps. I built a series of medical devices to isolate and protect compromised flesh rapidly and mitigate the infection, hypothermia, pain, and other problems the current standard of care tends to impart.
Q: Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey.
A: I was a happy firefighter/paramedic living a simple life in SW Colorado. I responded to a number of severe burn patients and saw first hand how delayed & damaging the current standard of care could be. At Upper Pine Fire I was in charge of EMS education for my shift and EMS supply purchasing for the entire department. So I think my field experiences combined with my education and procurement responsibilities gave me a unique perspective on some shortcomings in the medical device world. I began building my prototypes in 2021 and spent a lot of time at the drawing board. If these patients uniquely suffer from infection, hypothermia, pain, oozing fluid loss, and inflammation, then my goal was to mitigate those problems in as straightforward a manner as possible. I became satisfied with my first core devices and applied for our utility patent in May 2022. We’ve been patent-pending since then and have been engaged in the back and forth dance with the patent office. My initial idea was to create a patented series of devices and lease the IP immediately to some large company contacts I had made but sometimes the appetite comes with eating. As I started to see my inventions develop and learn of additional benefits I had never considered, I wanted to take charge of the entire process more and more. I raised capital in the summer of 2023 and have been engaging the FDA regulatory process, inventing additional devices and trademarks, and pursuing sterile manufacturing processes at homes and abroad ever since.
Q: What was the most powerful lesson you learned on this journey?
A: Just ask. It is harder to imagine a smaller fish in a larger pond than Emergency Dermal Solutions in the med tech space. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk with established medical device creators and they have happily answered every question I have had. Aside from their families, I suspect they are discussing topics they are most proud of and I think they sympathize with my limited experience. They’ve been open about mistakes and successes and have always put me in contact with another person that they think is going to be just as helpful for us.
Q: Why did you apply for the SCAPE Program?
A: I’ll take all the help I can get. I apply for grants, consider warehousing costs, wonder about federal government contracts, and much more daily. SCAPE seems like a great, immediate, local resource to address these needs and put me in contact with problem solvers.
Q: What companies inspire you the most (local, national, worldwide)?
A: Local: San Juan Sewing and Bedrock Bags are great local companies that either invent or repair outdoor gear in this outdoor recreation heavy area. They build or improve their products with end users in mind and I’d like to think we do, too. A national business would likely be SAM Medical Products out of Oregon. I was able to talk to Dr. Scheinberg and hear how he and his wife Scherrie developed their first orthopedic splints based on the malleability of a chewing gum packet. His devices are now the standard internationally and I hope one day we can say the same. A great international business would likely be the Freudenberg Group out of Germany, specifically their medical division. They are a huge international, family-based business and I met with quite a few of their key US and international people at the US’ biggest medical device manufacturing conference in Anaheim. They couldn’t have been any nicer, more patient, or more helpful to a less significant person.
Q: What do you love most about Southwest Colorado?
A: Everything. My friends, the fire and EMS culture, the landscape, my free housing (thanks Durango Fire), and nowadays just the amount of extremely talented med tech inventors or industry folks that decided to call this place home. I’ve turned around numerous times and stumbled into people that have dozens of medical device patents or navigated government contracting or studied infection transmission in the pre-hospital setting. I’m probably the luckiest guy in SW Colorado.
