Tara Melton ’11 has founded a company, Mackey Mask, to manufacture a medical device for patients requiring nasogastric (NG) feeding tubes. The idea for the new product came from Tara’s personal experience with her own child, beginning soon after she and husband Dr. Christopher Melton ’12 brought home their newborn son.
“Our son Maacoy was born in October 2021—a happy, healthy, nine-pound baby boy, and we left the hospital without any concerns,” Tara says. But at around five months old, “it was like a switch flipped,” she says, and Maacoy—or Mackey, as they call him— started rapidly dropping weight and refusing to eat. After a series of tests, he was diagnosed with eosinophilic esophagitis, a rare condition in children his age, and eventually was released from the hospital on a NG tube.
“It was the weeks and months that followed of caring for Mackey on his NG tube that made me realize what a huge problem placing and securing the NG tube is for patients and families,” Tara explained, also noting that 24 million people worldwide are placed on NG tubes every year, and that one in three children develop a skin injury due to adhesive on the face to hold the tube in place, among other complications.
Tara began experimenting with a better way to secure the NG tube. Her invention, Mackey Mask, is the first and only non-adhesive, non-invasive NG tube securement device in the world. “Doctors, nurses, therapists, and medical device experts have called Mackey Mask a ‘game changer’ and we are just getting started,” says Tara. “All of this is the result of a mom seeing a problem and sketching a solution after a particularly hard day of taking care of her sick child.” The Mackey Mask device is patent pending.