• ER physician Elizabeth Clayborne questioned why nosebleeds were still treated with improvised tools, and turned that insight into NasaClip, now FDA-registered and on the market.
• After years on the back burner, the company accelerated during the pandemic with support from TEDCO, which has now invested multiple times, most recently with $250K in pre-seed funding.
• Clayborne is already exploring broader uses for the device, including drug delivery like Narcan, highlighting how Maryland’s medtech infrastructure helps ideas grow beyond their first use case.
Elizabeth Clayborne likes to tell the story of a question her young daughter once asked her: “Mom, can boys be doctors?”
Clayborne smiled when she recounted it inside the glassy, second-floor 4MLK event space at the University of Maryland BioPark, but the moment carried weight. Her daughter wasn’t making a joke, she’d simply grown up surrounded by confident women physicians and assumed medicine belonged to women. In reality, women make up 38% of active medical doctors today, though the share is growing fast.
Clayborne took the question as a reminder of what generational progress looks like in real time: each wave of Maryland scientists and clinicians normalizing what the next one believes possible.
What happens after “Eureka!,” when an inventor starts the long journey from idea to the market?
Clayborne represents what Maryland (and most places) want more of: a practicing ER doctor who spotted a problem with care she could improve on. In her case, a decade ago, she was surprised to find nosebleeds were always treated with whatever gauze and simple tools were around the emergency room. Now, she’s gone to market with NasaClip, a simple medical device that could have wider uses, including administering medicine.
In November, around the time I interviewed her at an event hosted by the BioPark, she had just announced $250,000 in pre-seed funding from TEDCO, Maryland’s state-backed investment fund. The event’s focus was on what happens after “Eureka!,” when an inventor starts the long journey from idea to the market. Clayborne knows the path well.
Why isn’t there a better way to treat a nosebleed?
Clayborne came to her own eureka moment not as a biomedical engineer or device specialist, but as a physician new enough to emergency medicine to still question its inefficiencies. She noticed that 1 in 200 urgent care or emergency department visits included a nosebleed. Most were simple, non–life-threatening cases. Nearly all were handled inconsistently.
“I used to just be like, why are you in my ER with a nosebleed? Just hold pressure on your nose,” she said.
But she came to see that patients were often doing precisely the opposite of what the physiology required. They pinched the wrong spot. They leaned their heads back. Most critically, they failed to apply the 10 to 20 minutes of uninterrupted pressure needed to stop bleeding. Children and older adults, especially those on blood thinners, were the least likely to manage that well.
Then came the spark: Why did the ER rely on taped-together tongue depressors — a literal makeshift clamp — for something so routine?
“When I was in residency,” Clayborne recalled, “I was sitting in our sim lab learning how we do different interventions for nosebleeds, and I’m like, how is there not a device for this? We have devices for everything, and you’re telling me I need to MacGyver together tongue depressors and put them on a patient, and then we discharge over 90 percent of these patients, which means they don’t actually even need to be here.”
Clayborne filed a provisional patent in 2015. The idea was promising. But life intervened: marriage, parenthood, clinical practice. “Life was lifing,” she said. The idea simmered but never died.
A pandemic and a lesson in storytelling
Clayborne’s next inflection point came during COVID-19. She was six months pregnant, working at one of Maryland’s hardest-hit hospitals, quietly authoring the ventilator allocation protocol and intubating patients in parking lots. Because pregnant ER doctors were so rare, national news outlets kept calling. “I was on CNN, Yahoo Finance, MSNBC,” she said.
Those interviews taught her something unexpected: Storytelling was part of her job now. It was also part of innovation. Clear, grounded narrative helped the public understand risk, helped policymakers act and helped investors see potential.
That skill would later matter for NasaClip.
Clayborne gave birth in May 2020. During maternity leave, she enrolled in TEDCO’s Builder Fund accelerator, nursing her newborn while learning customer discovery and investment strategy. That first TEDCO investment, about $50,000, gave her runway and validation. It also plugged her into a Maryland ecosystem that had begun to treat clinician-founders as a strategic asset. She engaged in Maryland’s startup ecosystem, speaking and attending entrepreneur events.
By 2023, NasaClip was FDA-registered and selling online, rare speed for a regulated medical device. Then last fall, TEDCO expanded its commitment with a $250,000 pre-seed investment.
“Unfortunately, the care for nosebleeds offered at the emergency department tends to be invasive, costly and painful,” Clayborne said. “This is why I founded NasaClip: to fill the gap and enable the everyday person to take care of their own health and wellness.”
Once you learn to innovate, you start seeing problems differently
Clayborne laughed that residents in her ER now watch her closely. “I think they think I’m going to be so rich,” she said. But what she hopes they see is that innovation is not magic: it is a skill you can practice.
“Once you start flexing that muscle of innovation and “Eureka!,’” she said, “you just start seeing, what about this, what about that?”
One of those “what ifs” has already emerged. After treating multiple overdose patients, she wondered whether NasaClip’s intranasal sponges could be used to deliver naloxone (Narcan) more efficiently. The idea would turn NasaClip from a consumer device into a drug-delivery platform, opening the door to a $40-billion market in intranasal therapeutics.
For Clayborne, NasaClip might be just the beginning.
The system behind the spark
If Clayborne represents the clinician-founder, then Martha Wang of the Fischell Institute represents the system that helps sparks catch. Wang joined Clayborne and I at the UM BioPark panel.
Wang calls herself “a translator,” helping academics and clinicians lift their heads long enough to see how a technology might be used, or who might help. Her own eureka moment came during a break at the Maryland MedTech Summit she helped revitalize. She noticed a government scientist and a previously siloed academic deep in conversation.
“There was no beer because it was 10 a.m.,” she said, “but it was my eureka moment. I could see these little nucleuses of activity forming. This could actually be a great resource for our economy, specifically for the medtech community.”
The summit has since grown from 170 to more than 600 participants and is expanding statewide. Wang sees momentum, but also gaps. Maryland excels at early ideas and prototypes, she said, but needs more later-stage capital and structured hospital-system pathways to validate and scale new technologies.
“If you could take a technology in Maryland and, within two years, get it assessed, get data and get it into one of our hospital systems,” she said, “that would give us early wins and boost our ability to show VCs we have a pipeline.”
Clayborne’s daughter now knows boys can be doctors. But she also sees something just as important: a mother who saw a small, solvable problem and built something that could help millions, with a community, a university and a state ready to back her.
If Maryland keeps nurturing these intersections — these eureka spaces — the next generation of life-changing medical devices may be born just like NasaClip was: in a moment of unlikely insight, carried forward by an ecosystem learning to turn ideas into impact.
