Becoming the Builder: How Purpose Found Me in Medtech
- Apr 7
- 5 min read
By Joanna Nathan
CEO/Co-Founder, Prana Surgical
I didn’t set out to start a medtech company. I didn’t even know entrepreneurship was a job. I just wanted to build things that mattered and see the impact without waiting a decade for it to show up.
I’m a second-generation immigrant. My parents immigrated from India to the UAE, and I grew up watching them build a life from scratch in a place that wasn’t fully theirs. When I later immigrated to the United States, that mindset came with me. Success felt less like a choice and more like a responsibility.
I was interested in healthcare from the start, but not in care delivery. I wasn’t drawn to being the person at the bedside. I was drawn to creating new solutions that could help hundreds or thousands of patients at a time. At Rice University, I studied bioengineering and spent some time in benchtop research. I liked the rigor and the problem solving, but I was impatient. Publishing papers and pushing knowledge forward did matter, but I wanted impact sooner. I wanted to work on things that would be used in patients as soon as safely possible. I was introduced to the world of medtech and medical devices during my capstone design project as a senior at Rice, and I knew I’d found “my thing”.
After graduation, I took on roles in translational clinical research and product development because I wanted to learn how products were built and deployed. How devices moved through design controls, regulatory review, manufacturing, and eventually into operating rooms. That path put me in rooms where I was often the only woman, often the youngest, and often underestimated. I learned how to be prepared, overcome those perceptions, and how to keep going even when I wasn’t the obvious choice. I also learned how conservative healthcare can be. Once something works well enough, there is little incentive to rethink it. That mindset reduces risk, but it also creates blind spots. Over time, small compromises get normalized. Workflows calcify. Physicians adapt to tools and patients adapt to outcomes that were never really designed for them in the first place.
For a long time, my career was about building experience. Then it became about finding meaning.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, I lost my beautiful 4-year-old son Lionel. That loss forced a kind of reckoning I didn’t expect. It changed how I looked at healthcare and how I wanted to show up in it. Before, I cared about career growth and ownership and titles. After, all I cared about was impact and proximity. I wanted to be closer to patients and closer to the decisions that affected their lives. I wanted my work to help others in a way that felt real, not abstract.
Around that time, I was introduced to the surgeons who would become my co-founders at Prana Surgical. They were clinicians wrestling with a problem that had frustrated them for years. Early-stage lung cancer was being detected more often because of screening, but diagnosis and treatment hadn’t kept pace. Many patients with small lung nodules are placed into CT surveillance, sometimes for years, because guidelines are designed to avoid overintervention. The intent is right. No one wants to operate unnecessarily. But the reality is that surveillance often delays clarity. Patients live in limbo, watching and waiting, without a definitive diagnosis.
When those nodules eventually do require intervention, the tools available are still largely designed for later-stage disease. Very small nodules are treated with approaches meant for much larger tumors. The result is unnecessary loss of lung tissue, long recoveries, and lasting impacts on quality of life. We have built an entire pathway that is cautious on the front end and aggressive on the back end, and patients are caught in between.
We talk a lot in medicine about saving lives, and that definitely matters most. But we talk far less about preserving how people live after treatment, or about the burden of years spent in surveillance without answers. In lung cancer surgery, that gap is especially stark. Early-stage patients may survive their cancer, but at the cost of lung function they will never get back. That tradeoff has been accepted for decades. Now, it doesn’t have to be.
At Prana, we are focused on early intervention that is precise and tissue-sparing. In simple terms, we are building a minimally invasive, image-guided system that allows surgeons to accurately locate and remove small lung nodules while preserving as much healthy lung as possible. The goal is not to push more patients into surgery. It is to give clinicians a way to intervene thoughtfully when surveillance no longer feels like the right answer, and to do so without paying an outsized price in lost lung function or overly invasive surgery.
Since launching the company in 2022, we have raised $12 million, submitted our system to the FDA, and begun early feasibility clinical use. Those milestones are important, but they are not what motivates me day to day. What motivates me are the patients we’ve been able to give definitive answers, the clinicians who finally have a tool that matches the problem in front of them, and the idea that earlier diagnosis does not have to come with a hidden cost.
I am often asked what advice I would give to aspiring medtech inventors. I hesitate to generalize, but there are a few things I have learned the hard way.
First, this is a massive market, it’s not forgiving. The global medical device market was valued at roughly $572 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2034. Funders aren’t just looking for clever ideas. They are looking for solutions that fit into real clinical workflows and solve problems clinicians already feel.
Second, spend time with patients and providers early and often. Many of the most expensive mistakes in medtech come from building a cool technology and assuming clinical adoption will follow.
Third, accept that this is a long journey. There are no shortcuts through regulatory approvals, clinical trials, or manufacturing. Prana is not a quick success story. It is a multi-year effort built on persistence, iteration, and trust.
I share this advice because medtech needs more people willing to commit to the long, unglamorous work of getting it right. My personal mission to help patients is the reason I’m still here, building in a space that is slow, regulated, and often resistant to change. Medtech is not where you go for quick wins. If you believe that better tools can change how medicine is practiced, and that design decisions made early can shape how patients live years later, this is the field for you. For me, that is reason enough to keep building.
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