Company: NeoDuoFlo Pty Ltd
Founder, CEO & Director: Francesca Lily Coulthurst
Website: https://www.neoduoflo.au/
About NeoDuoFlo Pty Ltd
NeoDuoFlo Pty Ltd is an Australian, female-founded medtech company building a purpose-built neonatal feeding tube concept for a problem with no dedicated solution anywhere. It was founded by a neonatal intensive care nurse who watched the same failure repeat at the cot side, and believes those tools should evolve as fast as the medicine has.
The problem is CPAP belly syndrome. Premature babies on CPAP depend on positive airway pressure to breathe. That same pressure forces air into the stomach faster than an immature gut can clear it. The belly distends, presses on the diaphragm, and makes breathing harder for infants already struggling most. In babies under 1000 grams it has been reported in up to 83 percent (Jaile et al, AJR 1992), and those who develop it take around three days longer to reach full enteral feeds (Gu et al, 2024).
The response is ad hoc, and every version involves trade-offs. Feed the baby, or vent the stomach. One tube cannot do both. So clinicians swap tubes, place a second, or pause the feed. Every option costs the baby.
NeoDuoFlo is one tube designed to do both at once: feeding and passive venting, continuously, with no suction and no intervention.
The company was founded in 2025 and filed its provisional patent in September. Every engineering decision since has served one discipline: it must be a drop-in replacement. The patient may weigh under 500 grams, and nothing survives that asks a nurse to work differently at three in the morning. NeoDuoFlo goes where the current tube goes and connects to what it connects to.
The concept was kept orogastric rather than built into the respiratory circuit. Same site, same insertion, nothing new to learn, and it stays inside an established device class.
It was kept entirely passive, which was a choice rather than a limitation. Suction is available at every cot. We are not using it. Suction risks trauma to a preterm gastric mucosa, and it only vents when someone remembers to apply it. Passive venting is continuous and cannot be forgotten.
Standard enteral connectors were adopted rather than improved upon.
Fluid dynamics modelling was commissioned before any tooling was committed, and the results changed the design at the cost of a drawing revision rather than a tool. Manufacture went to an established catheter contract manufacturer from the outset, so manufacturability shaped the design early.
The regulatory route follows the same logic: a same intended use pathway rather than a novel classification, on advice from a regulatory consultant. Bench proof of concept work is complete, first prototypes are in manufacture, and we hold non-dilutive funding from the Australian National Fabrication Facility.
The founder still works in the unit, beside the babies this was built for. That is the point.
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