Surgery still runs on thread. You damage a nerve or tear the tissue around a hernia, and the fix is essentially sewing, a technique old enough to predate anesthesia. The trouble is that the needle can damage the very tissue it is meant to mend, and the outcomes show it: one recent meta-analysis found that only about 54 per cent of patients regain meaningful function after a stitched nerve repair. Tissium, a French medtech founded out of a PhD project, has spent years arguing that the better answer is glue, and it just closed a €60 million financing package to prove the argument pays in the operating room rather than the lab.

The pedigree is unusually heavy for a company most people have never heard of. The underlying chemistry was invented at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital by the bioengineers Maria Pereira, Jeffrey Karp and Robert Langer, the last of whom is a co-founder of Moderna and one of the most cited engineers alive. Tissium’s CEO and co-founder, Christophe Bancel, is the brother of Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel, which is the sort of detail that does not make the science work but does explain why a small French medtech keeps getting taken seriously by American investors. The company is headquartered in Paris, with a US base in Cambridge and a manufacturing site in Roncq, in the French north.

What the polymer actually does

Tissium makes what it calls biomorphic programmable polymers: adhesives that bind nerves or tissue and then, by design, get out of the way. Its first commercial product, Coaptium Connect, joins the severed ends of a nerve inside a small bioresorbable, 3D-printed chamber. A surgeon positions the ends with silicone applicators, then shines a light to cure a viscous pre-polymer into a flexible bond, no stitches through the nerve itself. The point is less trauma to the surrounding tissue and a cleaner heal than a needle allows. In an early single-arm study of twelve patients with finger and thumb nerve injuries, the company reported every patient regaining full flex and extension of the injured digit, pain-free, a year on. Twelve patients is a small number, and Tissium does not pretend otherwise, but a clean result is a clean result.

The regulatory milestone is the part that turns a science story into a business. A year ago the US Food and Drug Administration granted Coaptium Connect a De Novo authorisation, the pathway for a genuinely new kind of device with no predicate to copy, making it, by Tissium’s account, the first atraumatic system of its kind to reach US patients. A second product, for hernia repair, also carries FDA clearance, and a high-pressure vascular sealant for cardiovascular use is moving through the clinic behind them.

Read the capital stack, see the strategy

The financing is structured the way a company crossing from lab to market gets funded, and the structure is the tell. The €30 million equity tranche, a Series D-2 completed at the end of 2025, was led by an undisclosed US family-owned institutional investor, with new family offices, wealthy individuals and existing backers Mérieux Développement and Cathay alongside. Sitting next to it is up to €30 million of debt from the European Investment Bank, released in three €10 million tranches tied to commercial, clinical and financing milestones, the first expected before the end of June. Read it together and the plan is right there in the cap table: Europe’s public lender, under its InvestEU mandate, helps finance a French company’s push into American operating rooms. Tissium has raised on the order of €200 million in equity across its life to get here.

Bancel framed the moment as a change of identity, not just a top-up: “We are now executing on our transition into a commercial-stage MedTech company while continuing to advance a differentiated pipeline.” The competitive field is real, which is a sign the category is real. BioCircuit’s Nerve Tape uses tiny hooks rather than glue, and Axogen’s nerve grafts are already in wide use, though they require surgical implantation. Tissium’s pitch is that an atraumatic, light-cured bond beats both on trauma and on time.

So the science works and the regulators agree. What is unproven is the only thing that ultimately matters: whether a surgeon will reach for glue over a needle they have trusted their entire career. FDA clearance proves the device is safe and effective. It does not prove a single skeptical hand surgeon will change a habit formed over twenty years of operating. Tissium holds the approvals, the manufacturing and a French invention it is carrying to the country that buys the most surgery in the world. The needle, for once, has competition.