Your peripheral nerves are important. They carry sensory info like touch, temperature and pain back to the brain.
When these nerves are cut – in surgery or through injury – they can’t just fix themselves.
Repairing them is really intricate. Imagine: stitching together two bits of angel hair pasta (al dente).
This takes time. And skill. Nearly always, it takes microsurgery with a magnifying lens.
Or: You could just tape the severed nerves back together. (Really!)
Nerve Tape® makes this possible. It’s from BioCircuit Technologies, a startup launched with GRA investment.
Repairing nerves with Nerve Tape is 4x faster than suturing the nerves.
This speed matters a LOT in breast reconstruction after a mastectomy.
Because mastectomy and reconstruction procedures are increasingly being combined into one long surgery. As a result, nerve repair is often spotty or skipped.
Meaning: Women can experience intense chronic pain – or no sensation at all – if the nerves aren’t repaired.
Nerve Tape also gives surgeons great dexterity in head and neck procedures, from removing tumors to treating gunshot wounds.
Wrapping a nerve with Nerve Tape is so easy, “a 7-year-old can do it in less than a minute,” says BioCircuit CEO Michelle Jarrard.
The device was FDA-approved in 2022. Four years later, 450+ hospitals were using it. Another 100 were reviewing it.
Which brought BioCircuit $18 million in revenue in just two years (2024-25). And in August 2026, the company ranked in the top 5% on the Inc. 5000 “Fastest-Growing Private Companies" list.
More important, it brought countless patients a much greater prospect of complete healing.
GRA’s Innovation + Entrepreneurship program provided BioCircuit with repayable loan funding between 2020 and 2023. GRA Venture Fund also invested in BioCircuit.