Core body temperature, one of four vital signs in both healthy and sick patients, is critical to survival and overall well-being.

Well established clinical evidence shows that patients who undergo anesthesia have a rapid core temperature drop, which is characterized by a high risk of surgical infection, impaired drug metabolism, cardiac morbidity and impaired immune function. Financial consequences and medical liability of a single hospital acquired surgical site infection or of not maintaining normal body temperature are very significant. Current methods to control patient temperature to mitigate this risk are sometimes expensive, inefficient and inconvenient for today’s healthcare system.

Patients who have had an ischemic event or traumatic brain injury are susceptible to permanent and lasting damages or even death. Current solutions to mitigate this risk employ brute-force methods, are too cumbersome, too expensive, too hard to control, and often can’t be applied early enough within the time-limited critical window-of-opportunity.

Mercury was founded to create a platform of products to better mitigate these risks, and to also investigate other clinical areas where our technology and methods can solve difficult medical challenges.

In the US alone there are over 65 million procedures that require clinical application of patient warming or cooling each year.