EvoNexus portfolio company PolyVascular has won the 2026 AdvaMed Accel Virginia Shimer Rybski Memorial Award at The MedTech Conference in Boston. The award comes with a $15,000 cash prize, supported by Medmarc, and recognizes the company’s work on a transcatheter pulmonary valve built for young children with congenital heart disease. With this win, PolyVascular becomes the second EvoNexus company to receive the honor, following Vena Vitals in 2020.
Why AdvaMed Accel Honored PolyVascular
AdvaMed is the world’s largest medical technology association, and AdvaMed Accel is its division for small companies and startups, which make up more than 70 percent of its membership. Established in 2013, the Virginia Shimer Rybski Memorial Award goes to an early-stage company that shows entrepreneurial spirit, patient impact, and strong business execution.
For 2026, the award moved into the conference’s Innovation Pavilion, where a panel of investors and industry partners selected one exhibitor from the companies presenting there. Judges included Maria Berkman, Eric S. Heinz, Kenny Nova, and Ashley Seehusen. Katie Bales, PolyVascular’s VP of Investor Relations, was on hand for the check presentation on October 20, midway through a conference that ran October 18 to 21.
The award is named for Virginia Shimer Rybski, the late president and CEO of Regenesis Biomedical, who served on AdvaMed’s Board of Directors and the Accel Executive Committee before her passing in 2013. In AdvaMed’s announcement of this year’s winners, JC Scott, chief strategy officer and executive director of AdvaMed Accel, credited small companies with driving a large share of medtech innovation by “tackling difficult clinical problems” with technology that could change patients’ lives.
A Heart Valve Built for the Smallest Patients
Congenital heart disease is the most common birth defect in the United States. Children born with a faulty pulmonary valve often need it replaced, and for the youngest patients that has usually meant open-heart surgery with a conduit or a valve made from human or animal tissue. Those tissue valves wear out, can be targeted by the child’s immune system, and do not grow. Research presented by PolyVascular notes that many of these children go through three to five open-heart conduit replacements before adulthood.
The company is taking a different route. Its transcatheter pulmonary valve is a patented three-leaflet valve made from a durable, biocompatible polymer inside a balloon-expandable cobalt-chromium stent. It is delivered by catheter instead of open-heart surgery and is sized for children as young as two years old. As the child grows, the valve can be expanded with a balloon, and once a patient outgrows it, an adult-sized transcatheter valve can be placed inside it.
The valve has passed hydrodynamic and durability testing beyond 200 million cycles. In preclinical studies, it performed well with no polymer calcification and no need for blood thinners. PolyVascular has completed design freeze and is preparing for a first-in-human early feasibility study, backed in part by a $3 million SBIR Phase IIb grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
PolyVascular’s Momentum Keeps Building
The AdvaMed Accel award adds to a strong run for the company. In November 2025, PolyVascular was named overall winner of the American Heart Association’s Health Tech Competition at Scientific Sessions 2025. Years earlier, it took the medical device category of the American College of Cardiology’s ACC.18 Innovation Challenge. Each win has come from a different corner of the cardiology and medtech world, and each points to the same unmet need.
Founded by a Pediatric Interventional Cardiologist
PolyVascular was founded in 2014 by Dr. Henri Justino and Dr. Daniel Harrington, who now serves as the company’s VP of Materials Science and Engineering. Justino is an interventional cardiologist at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego and a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at UC San Diego. Before coming to San Diego, he spent years on the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine and served as medical director of the CE Mullins Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories at Texas Children’s Hospital.
After the ceremony, Justino said the team was grateful for the recognition and glad to present alongside so many companies pushing healthcare forward. He was especially excited to see “significant advances in medical device development for children.”
What This Means for EvoNexus MedTech
EvoNexus backs founders who take on hard problems, and few are harder than building an implant for a two-year-old. Pediatric devices have long trailed adult care, and Justino has said it is time for these technologies to reach the youngest patients the way they already reach adults. PolyVascular joined EvoNexus as part of our San Diego portfolio, highlighted in 2025: A Year of Records, and its recognition at AdvaMed’s flagship conference shows the kind of clinical impact our MedTech companies are building toward.
Congratulations to Dr. Justino, Dr. Harrington, Katie Bales, and the entire PolyVascular team.
About PolyVascular:
PolyVascular is a medical device company developing the first polymer-based transcatheter pulmonary valve designed specifically for young children born with congenital heart disease. Delivered by catheter and sized for patients as young as two, the valve can be expanded as a child grows and can later hold an adult-sized valve inside it, with the goal of sparing children repeated open-heart surgeries. The company was co-founded in 2014 by pediatric interventional cardiologist Dr. Henri Justino and materials scientist Dr. Daniel Harrington, and is part of the EvoNexus San Diego portfolio, where Dr. Justino works out of our incubator. PolyVascular’s work has been recognized by AdvaMed Accel, the American Heart Association, and the American College of Cardiology, and is backed by grant funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Learn more here.
About EvoNexus:
EvoNexus is California’s leading nonprofit technology startup incubator, with locations in San Diego and Irvine. Since its formation in 2010, EvoNexus has successfully built 291 companies with an exceptional survival rate of over 85%, with portfolio companies securing over $2.4B in cumulative venture funding, backed by a network of more than 400 venture capital and independent investors, and achieving 63 acquisitions alongside a successful IPO, with additional public market exits on the horizon and over $6 billion in pre-exit valuations. Backed by an elite network of global corporate partners, including Irvine Company, Qualcomm, AMD, BAE Systems, Viasat, ResMed, LG, Murata Manufacturing, and EMD Electronics, EvoNexus continues to drive massive economic impact across Southern California’s innovation economy, culminating in a record-breaking year with $619M raised for the portfolio in 2025 alone.