This article was originally published on Inc. as part of an interview with Joe Landolina, Co-Founder and CEO of Cresilon.
When he was a 17-year-old freshman at New York University, Joe Landolina saw a poster advertising the Tandon School of Engineering’s 2010 InnoVention Competition—where students pitch commercially viable prototypes of their inventions. He decided to sign up and enlisted his business-major friend Isaac Miller, 20, to help.
“I didn’t think we’d win,” Landolina told Inc. “If you got to the quarterfinals, they would give you free classes at the business school. And you know, for me as an engineer, I was curious.”
The two pitched a plant-based gel, developed by Landolina, that could stop bleeding and mold to injuries in seconds. But they didn’t reach the quarterfinals. Instead, they took home the first prize—and second place at NYU Stern’s New Tech Venture Competition.
More than a decade later, the school project has grown into Cresilon, a bioengineering research company that launched officially in 2010 with Landolina as CEO. Cresilon is currently headquartered in a 55,000 square foot facility in Brooklyn’s Industry City, where more than 100 employees work to produce Landolina’s invention: a plant-based, easy-to-use hemostatic gel that can stop bleeding in seconds without need for manual pressure.
The hydrogel, delivered in prefilled syringes, currently has two applications. Traumagel is used as an emergency treatment for temporary control of external bleeding in humans, in a 30ml presentation. Vetigel, in a 5 ml presentation, is used for veterinary surgery across the country. Both share the same homeostatic gel, with syringe sizing being its only difference. Each size is used for different uses and requires a separate FDA clearance.
With more than 5 million people dying from critical bleeding each year yet existing treatments have several limitations. Take tourniquets—they are painful and can only be left on for a couple of hours without doing more damage. Traumagel instead creates a mechanical barrier inside the wound, molding it to stop bleeding until a definitive treatment is available. Each patient who is treated with Traumagel is then delivered to a doctor along with a QR code with instructions on washing away the product with water.
In one instance, captured on a first responders body camera and published to Cresilon’s website, a tourniquet proved too painful and ineffective in staunching a wound, so the first responders pivoted to Traumagel to stabilize the patient.
Traumagel is currently available for emergency medical services around the country after receiving FDA clearance for emergency use in humans in 2024, launching worldwide in January 2025. According to the company, first responders reported in clinical use cases that Traumagel saved on average at least one life per day across the U.S., and the company says the product is “also being evaluated by the U.S. military and has been fielded by select units.”
From the kitchen to the city
Landolina’s invention has roots in his upbringing. Born in Brooklyn but raised next to his grandparent’s vineyard in the Hudson Valley, Landolina credits his grandfather, John Baldwin, with inspiring his scientific pursuits. Baldwin spent time as a pharmaceutical executive at Roche in the 70s.
But a calling will only get you so far—he needed access to equipment which he got in the winery lab, or what he describes as a “glorified kitchen counter.”
“Being a young teenager with full unfettered access to a laboratory was not something that my parents were as thrilled about as I was,” he says. “So they pushed me to go learn how to do lab research the right way.”
As a junior in high school, he did summer research at Columbia University focusing on cell scaffolding and tissue engineering. His experiments would serve as a precursor to the invention that would become Cresilon’s flagship product.
“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, so I pursued pre-med alongside engineering.” But his pre-med track was cut short once his finding—an algae-derived polymer that sticks to skin like liquid bandage—gained momentum. “When that cell scaffold experiment produced a new material, everything clicked. I realized this could transform how we stop bleeding,” he says.
Learning to pivot
By the time Landolina and Miller graduated college in 2014 and 2012 respectively, the duo had established a headquarters in Brooklyn. Today, after fifteen years in business, Landolina says not knowing how hard it is to build a business is his secret weapon.
“Being 17 years old, you see only the problem in front of you, you run into that problem like a brick wall, and then you find a way up and over that brick wall, and they can find another brick wall behind it.” he says of Cresilon’s early beginnings. “That breaks up the challenges into a way that you can learn on.”
Take the company’s earliest product, which actually wasn’t even for humans.
While Landolina’s first goal was to formulate a gel for human use, he found out it would be easier to tackle animal use before, marking the company’s first pivot.
“One of our earliest employees, Justin Canna, was also an intern at a zoo in New York. We realized around Hurricane Sandy that there were no good hemostatics to stop bleeding in the vet practice,” he says. “Trauma is a much bigger problem to solve there because the bleeds are much, much larger in the veterinary world.
And so the team prepared for Vetigel’s product launch in 2015. “We had over 15 percent of all veterinarians in the country reach out to try to buy Vetigel,” Landolina says. By July 2015, Cresilon organized a launch party at Prospect Park Zoo filled with veterinarians and researchers the company had flown in.
But by August, Cresilon realized Vetigel was not ready to launch and wouldn’t make it to veterinarians’ hands until 2020.
“10 percent of the time, the gel would do exactly what we wanted to do,” he says of the earlier Vetigel. “Inexplicably, 90 percent of the time, if you follow the same steps, it would do nothing.”
Building what’s missing
There were also supply chain issues.
At the time the company was still operating out of a 1930’s school house in Brooklyn, outsourcing sterility testing to one the country’s largest laboratories. But the gel was so novel, existing tests were not fit for the product, often coming back with false negative sterility reports.
“We made nine batches of product and the first six batches that we sent out for testing all came back with tests that said that the gel was sterile,” he says of that time. “We shipped the product to a partner, and when they received syringes, the syringes had turned black, admitting there’s some contamination, which means the testing was wrong.”
Since existing sterility tests existed for either liquids or solids, it makes testing a gel difficult. So Landolina figured he would need an entirely new test, bringing in an expert in-house to develop one.
“We realized that there were misses that were happening there that wouldn’t have been responsible to scale and so we had to take one of the most difficult decisions that I’ve had to make in my career: we pulled the plug on the launch,” Landolina says. “Cresilon had to become much larger in order to support the type of product that we had.”
It took until 2017 to develop a new testing protocol. “We went back to investors, we raised more capital, and we did it the right way, which I think we’re far better off for,” Landolina says. “We didn’t get here by not failing at all. We got here by making sure that we picked ourselves back up every time we weren’t successful.”
Today, with over 100 employees, and more than $100 million in funding, Cresilon has the capacity to produce roughly 300,000 syringes of TraumaGel this year and is actively looking for more FDA clearances on new applications. The company declined to provide annual sales and financial information, although it shared that by the end of 2025, Traumagel was used in over 150 agencies and 25 states.