Features

MassDevice Q&A: Abiomed CEO Michael Minogue

July 9, 2010 by Christian Holland

Abiomed Inc. (NSDQ:ABMD) makes cardiac assist devices powerful enough to pump more than a gallon of blood through the heart each minute and small enough to be placed inside the heart via catheter. It's a highly specialized, highly competitive market that's difficult to break into.

At an investors meeting in Boston last week, the company sought to deliver the message that its devices offer a less invasive option than ventricular assist devices and don't need to be combined with inotropic drugs as is often the case with intra-aortic balloon pumps. It's been two years since Abiomed won 510(k) clearance from the Food & Drug Administration for its Impella 2.5 device; at the conference, CTO Dr. Thorsten Siess acknowledged that physicians have been slow to adopt the device.

MassDevice Q&A: John Abele, Part II

June 10, 2010 by Brad Perriello

Boston Scientific Corp. (NYSE:BSX) co-founder John Abele told us about the origins of the medical device giant in the first installment of a lengthy chat with MassDevice, detailing its start in the basement of a famed Czech mystic's lab in a Catholic church rectory.

In the second installment, Abele touches on how he and co-founder Peter Nicholas engineered the Boston Scientific's launch, how his involvement with the Natick, Mass.-based company evolved over the years and how being a "cheap son of a bitch" helped drive creativity and innovation in the early days.

MassDevice Q&A: Practice Fusion founder and CEO Ryan Howard

June 9, 2010 by Christian Holland

To raise the seed money for Practice Fusion, founder Ryan Howard sold his house and car.

"I was really going all in," the 34-year-old CEO told MassDevice.

Howard might have made a smart bet. According to Practice Fusion, the company has the fastest-growing user base of any electronic medical record company in the country, at 40,000 members. Its offering is free for physicians, using a largely advertising-based business model.

MassDevice Q&A: Molecular Biometrics CEO Jim Posillico

May 3, 2010 by Brad Perriello

Jim Posillico has a long academic and commercial pedigree in reproductive medicine, having spent time as a researcher at Harvard Medical School, Serono Laboratories, the Ares-Serono Group, InterMune Life Sciences and SAGE BioPharma.

So when he learned of a metabolomics platform being developed at McGill University, he was quick to realize its applicability to a variety of potential conditions and disease states. The technology allows the comparison of biomarkers produced by cell metabolism monitor the progress of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

MassDevice Q&A: GenomeQuest CEO Ron Ranauro

March 16, 2010 by Brad Perriello

Ron Ranauro spent the better part of two decades in the computer industry, watching as the personal computer and the Internet transformed the business. It's growing maturity coincided with early efforts to sequence the human genome, leading Ranauro in the late 1990s to apply his computing chops to the life science scene.

MassDevice spoke with Ranauro as GenomeQuest launched an application programming interface that allows developers to customize apps for their labs' research programs. We asked him about the API, what sets his venture apart from other sequencing data management firms (hint: it's in the clouds) and got his take on the ethical implications of widespread access to genome sequencing technology.

MassDevice Q&A: PatientKeeper CEO Paul Brient

February 4, 2010 by Brad Perriello

Paul Brient, the president and CEO of PatientKeeper Inc., has spent 20 years in the healthcare IT trenches, first with the physician practice management software start-up he founded and ran, BCS Inc. After stints at McKesson Corp. (NYSE:MCK), HPR Inc. and The Boston Consulting Group, he joined PatientKeeper in 2002.

MassDevice Q&A: CeQur CEO Jim Peterson

January 21, 2010 by Brad Perriello

Jim Peterson spent the better part of 20 years helping to improve the quality of the world's blood supply at Haemonetics Corp. (NYSE:HAE), where he was CEO from 1998 to 2003. And while he was passionate about the importance of that work, his new role as chief executive for CeQur Ltd. might be even closer to his heart.

Peterson spoke with MassDevice just before giving a presentation on the patch-like device CeQur is developing for insulin delivery at the OneMedPlace Finance Forum in San Francisco Jan. 13. He told us about the personal connection he feels to his current work, which stems from the fact that his daughter has diabetes, and why he sees Montreux, Switzerland-based CeQur's device as a potential market leader.

Researchers take on the FDA

January 7, 2010 by Brian Johnson

It's not often that a few doctors ensconced in the ivy towers of academia can get a lumbering dinosaur like the Food & Drug Administration to turn on a dime, let alone during the week between Christmas and the new year.

But that's exactly what University of California at San Francisco researchers Sanket S. Dhruva, Lisa Bero and Rita Redberg did after the Journal of the American Medical Assn. published their paper "Strength of Study Evidence Examined by the FDA in Premarket Approval of Cardiovascular Devices."

MassDevice Q&A: Serica Technologies CEO Greg Altman

December 28, 2009 by Brad Perriello

Thirteen years ago Greg Altman, president and CEO of Serica Technologies Inc., blew out his knee playing football. After reconstructive surgery on his ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, the former All-American at Tufts University found the rehabilitation process so challenging that he set out to develop an alternative.

MassDevice Q&A: Advertising executive Bruce Lehman

December 23, 2009 by Brian Johnson

Bruce Lehman's been in the advertising game since the late 1970s, but the principal at Lehman Millet, a Boston-based marketing and communications agency, has been focused on the medical device and diagnostics industry solely since the 1990s, making it a powerful player in the industry despite its relatively small size.

Today, Lehman Millet's client mix includes biotechnology, biomaterials and specialty pharmaceutical firms, along with its core medical device customers. MassDevice: spoke with Lehman, 59, about an ever-present question: "How, exactly, do you market a medical device?"

Winning the arms race: The centuries-old quest to build a better prosthetic

November 25, 2009 by Alan Siegel

JUNE 22, 2008 WAS A GORGEOUS EARLY SUMMER DAY, with partly cloudy skies and 80-degree temperatures.

Taking advantage of the weather, Greg Reynolds, a muscular 24-year-old veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, hopped on his yellow Suzuki TL1000R racing bike to spend the morning at Colt State Park in Bristol, R.I., a swath of land on Narragansett Bay some 17 miles south of his house in Dighton, Mass.

The TL1000R is not a motorcycle for the casual rider. Its 996C, 4-stroke engine is capable of 9,500 RPM — or zero to 60 miles per hour in about 3.6 seconds — giving the rider the feeling of being strapped onto the nose of a rocket.

The prosthetic fitting process

November 20, 2009 by Alan Siegel

Prosthetist Luke Richards' small office is tucked deep inside the Jamaica Plain branch of the VA Boston Healthcare System. One morning this spring, a patient's carbon fiber leg rests by his desk. A chrome briefcase, with a picture of Greg Reynolds' new arm on it, sits on the window sill.

Here, in the E Wing of the hospital, veterans are fitted for prosthetic devices. It doesn't end with arms, legs, hands and feet, either. For example, Reynolds is itching to get back to regularly riding his ATV. So Richards suggested a sleeve that will fill out Reynolds' shirt while he's riding.

For Richards, the question is always the same.

"What do we need to do," he says, "to get [the patient] doing what he used to do?"

MassDevice Q&A: GE Healthcare's David Freeman

November 17, 2009 by Brad Perriello

It's no secret that wireless technology is in a growth spurt. From WiFi cars on commuter trains to the omnipresent Bluetooth and iPhone devices, as the saying goes, "There's an app for that."

The medical industry is no exception. Wireless medical devices are becoming more and more common, with innovations like pacemakers that can send data directly to physicians. GE Healthcare is looking to push the envelope even further, with a vision for wireless medical monitoring systems that would eliminate the rat's nest of cables that spring up around hospital patients.

MassDevice Q&A: Maggie Pax

October 23, 2009 by Brian Johnson

MicroCHIPS Inc. may have been the result of divine inspiration (as the story goes, MIT professor Robert Langer thought of the idea while watching PBS), but it took people like Maggie Pax to turn his vision into a suite of implantable devices that could one day revolutionize medicine.

MassDevice Q&A: Steve Atkinson & Scott Schorer

October 19, 2009 by Brad Perriello

When Systagenix Wound Management, the former professional wound care business of Johnson & Johnson's Ethicon subsidiary, was carved out late last year, the timing wasn't propitious. Credit markets were frozen and the global economy was staring into an abyss with another Great Depression at the bottom.

Nearly a year later, it's a different story. The credit crisis has eased, there are signals that the recession may be coming to an end and Systagenix is on a roll, having engineered the spinout with help from backers One Equity Partners and JP MorganChase.

MassDevice Q&A: William Rutan

October 14, 2009 by Brian Johnson

How do you get people to talk to their doctors about something so embarrassing they'll barely admit it to themselves?

That's the challenge facing Greenwich, Conn.-based medical device startup Mederi Therapeutics and the minimally invasive treatment for fecal incontinence it says will eliminate the need for drastic colostomy procedures.

Mass Device Q&A: Dave Kroll

October 5, 2009 by Jim Montalto

Dave Kroll, the founder and principal of Kroll Associates, works out of his office in western Massachusetts, which, according to him, proves there is life in design and product development beyond Worcester and the Greater Boston area.

In fact, Kroll sees his distance from Boston as an advantage, since he can also tap New York, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire and beyond for new work.

He has clients in and around Boston, sure — one of his biggest is in Waltham — but his ties to New England universities, contractors and manufacturers, and his persistence in maintaining a presence with clients, either virtually or through office visits, keeps him on top of the industry.

MassDevice Q&A: Dave Bergstein

September 30, 2009 by Brad Perriello

Ask Dave Bergstein about the next big thing in diagnostics and his eyes light up. The Zoíray Technologies Inc. founder and CEO runs startup that's developing a next-generation multiplexed immunoassay platform Bergstein thinks will become the new state-of-the-art standard for studying proteins.

MassDevice Q&A: Richard Schumacher

September 21, 2009 by Brad Perriello

Richard Schumacher is no stranger to successful start-ups. The Pressure BioSciences founder, president and CEO had a hand in five early-stage life science ventures, including Boston Biomedica.

MassDevice Q&A: John McDonough

August 4, 2009 by Joe Nowlan

John McDonough, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based T2 Biosystems Inc., is an optimist.

Bullish on his 22-employee company's prospects (the estimated $40 billion diagnostics market might have something to do with that), McDonough (far left in the picture at right) spoke with MassDevice about the technology behind T2's diagnostic device, which uses a miniaturized version of a magnetic resonance imaging machine to deliver near-instant test results from just about any blood, urine or saliva sample.

MassDevice Q&A: Jean-Marc Wismer

July 14, 2009 by Brian Johnson

You literally cannot see glaucoma coming.

Although it's one of the leading causes of blindness in the world, frighteningly little is known about a disease group that affects 4 percent of the world's population over the age of 40. No cure is on the horizon. And due to the insidious nature of the disease, which stars gradually affecting sight from the periphery, most people don't even know they're suffering from glaucoma until it's too late.

Swiss diagnostics company Sensimed AG sees this mysterious disease as a real opportunity.

MassDevice Q&A: Stuart Randle

July 7, 2009 by Brad Perriello

Stuart Randle, president and CEO of Lexington-based GI Dynamics, has a long career in medical devices under his belt. Originally a mechanical engineer with a degree from Cornell University, Randle got into the device world during his MBA studies at Northwestern University and never looked back.

MassDevice Q&A: Shawna Gvazdauskas

June 30, 2009 by Brian Johnson

Shawna Gvazdauskas has a knack for bringing medical devices to market. The 53-year-old is on the third start-up of her 30-year career. In March, she left insulin management maker Insulet, where she helped bring the company's flagship Omnipod to market, for a new challenge at Isis Biopolymer Inc., which is developing a new generation of non-invasive drug delivery patches.

MassDevice Q&A: Amar Sawhney

June 19, 2009 by Brian Johnson

Amar Sawhney has a knack for turning gel into gold.

Over the years, the serial entrepreneur managed to leverage his work in hydrogel technology at the University of Texas into the basis for six companies, including one snapped up by Genzyme early in the decade and another that Covidien predecessor Tyco Healthcare acquired in 2006.

MassDevice Q&A: Jeff Burbank

June 10, 2009 by Jim Montalto

More than 20 years of developing, marketing and manufacturing products for end-stage renal disease patients led NxStage Medical Inc. founder, president and CEO Jeff Burbank to a realizations: The key to improving care is to look beyond the hospital and into the home.

The Lawrence-based company makes a home dialysis system that allows patients with kidney disease to better manage their own treatment. Burbank talked with MassDevice about how the success of the product hinges on improving patients' quality of life and how the success of the company relies on the timing of finding and keeping great employees.

MassDevice Q&A: Paul Nickelsberg

June 9, 2009 by Jim Montalto

Orchid Technologies Engineering & Consulting president and CTO Paul Nickelsberg is an electronics industry veteran, with experience ranging from high-end computing design to networking and telecommunications under his belt.

But it was his "try anything once" attitude that helped him break into the medical devices market.MassDevice caught up with Nickelsberg recently to get his ideas on coming challenges for the medical device market and his strategy for keeping clients happy during uncertain economic times.

MassDevice: How did your company get into medical devices?

Pumped up

June 3, 2009 by Alison Carter

The symptoms had started about three weeks before — feeling constantly tired and thirsty, going to the bathroom frequently and losing a drastic amount of weight.

My doctor told my parents to bring me to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where I would learn how to adjust my diet and schedule, administer medication and deal with the illness.

Letting in the light

May 19, 2009 by Jim Montalto

There's a certain irony to Amorphex Therapeutics working in the dark basement of a 100-year-old Andover mill building.

"It’s atrocious, but classic," president and CEO Robert Thompson laughs, trying to explain the peculiarity of scientists working on cutting-edge ophthalmic technology in an antiquated former mill complex.

MassDevice Q&A: MassMEDIC president Tom Sommer

May 1, 2009 by Brad Perriello

Tom Sommer's been a major player on the Massachusetts medical device scene for more than a dozen years. As president of the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council (MassMEDIC), Sommer runs the nations largest regional medical device council, addressing the needs of more than 400 member companies.

With the council's May 5 annual conference on the horizon, MassDevice visited Sommer at MassMEDIC's offices at the Boston Medical Center (PDF) campus to find out what's on the minds of the device company executives he visits each week, how they're coping with a down economy and the challenges imposed by the Bay State's stringent gift ban.

Banned in Boston

April 6, 2009 by Chris Markuns

Pharma is sexy. Big drugs, big money, big news. In the life sciences arena, perhaps only biotech commands a higher political and public profile.

So it isn’t surprising that the medical device industry’s groundbreaking inclusion in Massachusetts’ new code of conduct garnered relatively little attention.

But the new rules governing industry payments to physicians — the so-called "gift ban" — include provisions aimed at curbing what some call undue and improper influence by medical device manufacturers.

Smart Surfaces aims to put bedsores to rest

March 30, 2009 by Alan Siegel

Tim Moutafis has visions.

Sitting in his racing green Triumph TR7 convertible one summer afternoon in August 1993, the Smart Surfaces Inc. founder envisioned miniature robots roaming around the human body, fixing problems. A decade later, daydreaming at work, he saw a living, breathing blob.

“A blob that knows your body very well and listens to it,” Moutafis explains from his office at Science Research Laboratory in Somerville, Mass.

“It sends information, it sort of heals you, protects you, rejuvenates you.”

Organic growth

March 30, 2009 by Brandie Jefferson

It turns out the secrets of science aren't always on the tip of your nose.

At Organogenesis, a Canton-based tissue regeneration firm, the company’s signature product, Apligraf, is derived from the cells of foreskins donated by the mothers of newborn baby boys. A single donor can eventually generate up to two football fields’ worth of Apligraf, according to Dario Eklund, the company’s VP of bioengineering and bioaesthetics.

That’s because the newborn donors’ cells are "so young, so robust, so full of life, that they can divide and build cell banks," Eklund explains.

Running in place

March 30, 2009 by Brian Johnson

Frank Reynolds taught himself how to walk again after doctors said he couldn't. He made a monkey run two weeks after a traumatic spinal cord injury. In fact, Frank Reynolds might even hold the cure for paralysis in the palm of his hands.

Who knew that would be the easy part?

Just after an investors conference last fall, Reynolds, the founder and chief executive of Cambridge’s InVivo Therapeutics Corp., stood just outside the conference center at Umass Boston’s Campus Center looking slightly bewildered.