Sean T. Runnels MD

Dr. Sean Runnels is an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and CEO of Through The Cords LLC. His career is focused on improving access to safe airway management; where ever and whenever it is needed. He spent three continuous years in Africa providing care aboard the Africa Mercy surgical hospital ship and teaching anesthesiology as Faculty with the National University of Rwanda. The experience of managing airways and providing anesthesia in a wide variety of austere and challenging settings is the key driver behind his efforts to translate these unique experiences and research into real-world value for patients, providers, and health systems.

He believes that his work designing and commercing better intubation equipment is the essence of translational science. Via his company, he currently has three FDA-registered devices in clinical use and several more in the pipeline. In addition to his commercial efforts, he is actively involved in clinical research and teaching in the airway management space. He is engaged in teaching, advising, and board-level global health efforts as well. Safe intubation is a critical bottleneck in the ability to accessing critical care and major surgery in all settings be they high resource or austere. Value is created by designing and commercializing medical devices and teaching systems that shorten training times and produce optimal outcomes in a wide variety of patients and settings. He believes that challenging and austere conditions provide the design pressures to create better equipment and real and value.