Disrupting Health Care

Physician and entrepreneur Thomas Lendvay builds innovative solutions to improve medical outcomes.

Photo of Thomas Lendvay
Thomas Lendvay ’95, a practicing surgeon and professor in Seattle, co-founded a company that used methylene blue dye to help disinfect face masks.

Spring 2025
By Alex Becker
Photos By M. Scott Brauer

Thomas Lendvay ’95 never set out to become an entrepreneur — much less sell his first company to Johnson & Johnson. But as he built a career as practicing surgeon and professor at the University of Washington, he noticed opportunities for improvement in training and performance in his field.

Driven by curiosity and a creative approach to problem-solving, Lendvay has founded multiple startups that have introduced bold ideas in health care — from using public crowdsourcing to improve urological surgery to integrating methylene blue into masks during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I’m interested in disruptive technologies that are hiding in plain sight,” Lendvay says. “And when someone says, ‘There’s no way this will work,’ that’s when I dig in.”

Lendvay had an early fascination with science and medicine, thanks to a pediatrician from his childhood, but it wasn’t until medical school that he discovered his true calling. Originally planning to avoid surgery, he chose it as his first rotation “just to get it out of the way.” Instead, he fell in love with the field and was drawn to a surgical specialty that would not only allow him to work with children but to change their lives for the better for years to come. 

“Kids give you energy when you go to work,” he says. “And it’s rewarding knowing that these reconstructive surgeries can positively impact a child’s life for decades.” Lendvay’s first major venture, C-SATS, was born from his recognition of a critical gap in surgical skills in the operating room.
 

Thomas Lendvay with a Tend patented device
Thomas Lendvay pictured with a small collection and processing device that allows doctors and veterinarians to homogenize and encapsulate fecal microbiotal transplant material.

“There is a huge variability in technical performance among different surgeons in the operating room, and that directly impacts patient care,” Lendvay says. Because they perform a lot of their surgeries robotically, Lendvay recognized that he could record the surgeries as a first step for quality improvement.

The unconventional piece was leveraging “the wisdom of crowds” and having nonmedical members of the public provide personalized feedback to the surgeons — which, to the surprise of almost everyone but him, vastly improved patient outcomes for the surgeons who were critiqued. The platform was so successful that it garnered the attention of Johnson & Johnson, which acquired the company in 2018.

Lendvay founded Singletto during the pandemic, opting to bake methylene blue — a dye with antimicrobial properties — into PPE while the rest of us were kneading sourdough.

“Methylene blue is the oldest synthetic chemical in the world, and clinically it has been used as a treatment for brain cancer,” he says. But Lendvay and a colleague decided to try using the dye to disinfect face masks. Turns out, it effectively killed SARS-CoV-2 on contact. Together, they developed an antimicrobial brand ingredient, drawing interest from the World Health Organization and the U.S. military. 

At the same time, Lendvay was also working on Tend, a medical treatment that focuses on the gut microbiome, leveraging fecal microbiota transplants to treat health issues like C. diff infections and Crohn’s disease and even support immunotherapy treatments for certain cancers. With a patented device that simplifies the transplant process, Tend aims to use the science of gut health to improve medical therapies for both humans and animals.
 

Photo of Thomas and Kathleen Lendvay
Lendvay and his wife, Kathleen Gilpin Lendvay ’96, are co-founders of Tend and Amend Pet, a startup focusing on treating human and pet GI distress via microbiome transplants.

Lendvay’s wife, Kathleen Gilpin Lendvay ’96, is the co-founder and COO of Tend and was instrumental in creating the company from the ground up.

Lendvay credits Rice for building a foundation that has helped him pursue big ideas. Its proximity to the Texas Medical Center also played a pivotal role, as did the opportunity to work in a molecular genetics lab at Baylor College of Medicine during his undergraduate years. One letter of recommendation from that experience became instrumental in his acceptance to the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University and, as he put it, “has followed him throughout his career.” To this day, his Rice diploma is the only one hanging in his office — displayed proudly for his patients, perhaps inspiring the next Owl-turned-entrepreneur.