From CWRU student innovator to biotech leader: Franco Kraiselburd is on a mission to make advanced wound care accessible to everyone. Now, with $3.5 million in funding and a growing team of 24, his company has partnered with Nottingham Spirk to scale production of an innovative wound care treatment.
Julie Washington | cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland biotech start-up Asclepii, founded in a college dorm room, is seeking to change lives for people facing amputation from wounds that refuse to heal.
The key is Asclepii’s gel, called Poseidon, which contains tiny particles of antibacterial silver. The gel can successfully heal hard-to-close wounds and is touted as safer and more affordable than similar products because it uses less silver.
Asclepii’s mission is to develop technology that could help chronic wounds heal faster and reduce life-threatening infections, for less cost than existing treatments, said CEO Franco Kraiselburd.
Franco Kraiselburd, founder of Cleveland biotech start-up Asclepii.
He founded the company in 2022 while studying at Case Western Reserve University, and named it for Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. Poseidon is one of the startup’s most important products.
“If skin infections (from an open wound) get into your blood flow, it can reach your heart, and that’s known as sepsis,” said Kraiselburd, 24, who lives in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland. “You can be dead within hours.”
Podiatric surgeon Megan Oltmann, now with University Hospitals, said during her time in private practice, the Poseidon gel helped a Cleveland woman avoid a leg amputation.
The patient’s diabetes, neuropathy and frequently blocked arteries made it hard for her body to heal. After a year of little progress in closing a chronic wound, Oltmann prescribed the gel.
Ten weeks later, it had fully healed, she said.
“She was very excited to be able to move on with her life,” Oltmann said. “That’s my biggest home run with the product so far.”
Northeast Surgical Wound Care, a wound-healing clinic in Independence, also saw Poseidon quickly heal a trauma victim whose wound had lingered for more than a year, said CEO Dr. Keith Warner. Applying the gel every two to three days led to less wound drainage and pain, he said.
“It’s pretty amazing,” said Warner, whose clinic has used the silver-infused gel on about 20 patients in a year’s time.
“We’ve got to find different treatment mechanisms that help patients and bring the cost of care down to a sensible level,” Warner said. “It looks to me as if a product like Poseidon has the opportunity to do that.”
Artemis wound dressing innovation by Kraiselburd.
Another Asclepii product, the wound dressing Artemis, is Kraiselburd’s invention and is awaiting FDA clearance.
Artemis, which looks like a spongy disk, supplies a scaffolding that encourages cells around a wound to grow tissue instead of collagen. This approach reduces scarring, Kraiselburd said.
Asclepii recently announced a partnership with Cleveland product development firm Nottingham Spirk to scale production of Artemis.
Childhood Passions Lead To CWRU
Kraiselburd has been fascinated with science since childhood. He took a job washing beakers in a laboratory and joined a science fair team that competed internationally at an age when most kids are into sports or comic books.
His interest in regenerative medicine — which focuses on tissue repair — deepened when he began researching mesenchymal stem cells. The cells, which play a key role in tissue repair and regeneration, were first identified by Arnold Caplan, a pioneering biology professor at CWRU.
Kraiselburd later came to CWRU to study under Caplan, forming a close relationship with the scientist until his death in 2024.
“He was like a grandpa to me,” said Kraiselburd, who graduated from CWRU in 2024 with a degree in biomedical engineering.
The story of a driven person with disruptive ideas who raises enough money to launch a start-up is one that Northeast Ohio’s biotech sector likely wants to hear more often.
Over the past four years, Asclepii has grown to include four full-time and 20 part-time staff. The company, which has lab space inside CWRU’s Millis Hall, attracted about $3.5 million in funding and plans to announce another round of fundraising soon.
Cleveland’s Start-Up Landscape
Asclepii’s office headquarters, inside the old BioEnterprise building off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, is a testament to the vagaries of the start-up world. BioEnterprise was an incubator for businesses in the biotech and healthcare industry until it closed in 2023.
Kraiselburd pointed to what he called the Cleveland region’s “chronic and alarming lack of (early-stage) funding” as a primary reason why biotech startups struggle here.
Asclepii CEO Franco Kraiselburd at Case Western Reserve University’s Millis Hall, where his biotech firm has lab space. Kraiselburd started the company while a student at CWRU.
However, some new healthcare companies have made gains in recent years.
Lamassu Biotech, a start-up from North Carolina, expanded to Cleveland to take advantage of its partnership with the Cleveland Clinic. The company is developing an innovative gene therapy for hard-to-treat cancer.
And in late 2025, two Cleveland startups — Neuronoff Inc., and MediView XR Inc. — announced successful rounds of funding, allowing them to advance their products.
Future young entrepreneurs looking to launch a company from their dorm room will need persistence, Kraiselburd said.
“In my case, I was stubborn,” he said. “It took me 10 years of research before I raised my first million dollars. It was the equivalent to rubbing my face against the concrete, but I have no regrets.”
Kraiselburd demonstrates his invention, the wound dressing Artemis. The spongy disk supplies a scaffolding that encourages cells surrounding a wound to grow tissue cells, reducing scarring.
Photos by Julie Washington, cleveland.com
About Nottingham Spirk
Nottingham Spirk is a world-class product innovation firm with an unrivaled record of developing and commercializing disruptive consumer products, medical devices, digital IoT products and connected industrial products. We collaborate with Fortune 1,000 companies, middle market companies and funded venture companies to discover, design and execute product innovation programs and strategic business platforms that will delight customers, grow markets, and generate new revenue streams. Learn more about our innovation approach.