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Patent Awarded for Focused Ultrasound Skin Treatments

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (A. Kotok)

9 Nov. 2022. A company developing non-invasive ultrasound treatments for treating skin disorders and removing tattoos received a patent for its technology. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office yesterday awarded patent number 11,491,351 to Tomasz Zawada and Torsten Bove, founders of TooSonix A/S in Hoershoem, Denmark, and assigned the patent to the company.

TooSonix is a five year-old enterprise applying focused ultrasound, concentrated acoustic waves directed at the skin as a therapy for a number of skin conditions. The company says its systems focus the acoustic beams to create a tiny lesion or heat a small area of the skin to kill diseased cells or activate healthy cells. According to the patent, the ultrasound waves penetrate between 0.1 and 5 millimeters into the skin at frequencies of 7 megahertz or higher. The focused ultrasound also activates an immune system response, from macrophages that engulf and absorb the diseased cells or debris from the treatments.

According to TooSonix, the focused ultrasound beams can treat several skin disorders including actinic keratosis that forms scaly patches on the skin, darkened benign skin growths from seborrheic keratosis, and basal cell carcinoma, a common form of skin cancer. In October 2022, the company published a case study of a patient with condyloma acuminatum or genital warts, a common sexually transmitted disease associated with the human papillomavirus or HPV.

Patents in three main markets

According to the paper in the journal Case Reports in Dermatology, the topical immunotherapy imiquimod applied for seven weeks removed 70 percent of the warts, while the TooSonix ultrasound removed the remainder. Imiquimod, according to Medline, is not designed to cure genital warts, and they can recur during treatment. The authors say the ultrasound treatments did not create airborne HPV that could pose a health risk for clinicians.

Bove and Zawada say the new patent completes the company’s intellectual property protections in Europe, China, and now the U.S., its three main markets. Lone Schoett Kunoee, CEO of Consolidated Holdings and chairman of TooSonix, says in a company statement released through Cision, “Our strategy on protecting intellectual property rights is key to the future success of this fascinating technology. We invested in TooSonix from the very early phase as we saw a great potential in developing the technology into a broader range of applications as well as commercializing the product to a world market.”

While the TooSonix announcement focuses on therapeutic applications, the patent document talks more about using the technology for tattoo removal than skin disorders. The document text says focused ultrasound is safer and less invasive than mechanical, chemical, and laser tattoo removal methods that are known to cause scarring or require repeated applications.

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