The Medical Device Business Journal — Medical Device News & Articles | MassDevice
At the end of 2009, I summarized the fundraising atmosphere for venture capital raising funds that invest in the life sciences. Now data is out for VC as a whole:
“2009 can officially go on record as the lousiest year since 1993 (in terms of number of funds raised) or 2003 (in terms of dollars committed).”
So how did my sub-set of funds that at least partially invest in the life sciences compare with the entire group?
Over the past year, I’ve described the dismal state of VC and the problems this industry has had raising new funds. Certainly, these issues have been widely reported and discussed elsewhere.
I sat down with Theresa Smith, district sales manager for Instron at the recent North American Spine Society meeting to talk about what trends she sees for the mechanical testing apparatus industry, specific to medical device applications. Instron is a manufacturer of mechanical testing equipment and has a variety of types, from ball screw-driven for plain tensile or compression tests to servohydraulic and electrodynamic for fatigue or fracture toughness tests.
What can the independent test labs tell us about the state of innovation within the orthopedics industry? Quite a lot, because these vendors to medical device designers and manufacturers generally only test devices that have not yet come hit the market. I spoke with representatives of six bio-mechanical test labs across the U.S., hoping to tease out trends for what types of medical devices are being tested more as well as the geographic location of these innovators:
Soteira Inc. emerged from stealth mode at the 24th annual meeting of the North American Spine Society.
CEO Larry Jasinski and other representatives of the Natick, Mass.-based spine start-up showed a video describing their vertebroplasty system to conference attendees and publically parted with a few details of their technology:
First it was Integra picking up IST‘s IP for a cool $9 million. Then Synovis bought out Pegasus Biologics for horse feed ($12.1 million). And Cardo Medical did the same with Vertebron, for a bargain-basement price of $1.3 million.
Now a similar deal has gone through, with Facet Solutions buying Archus Orthopedics’ IP.
There’s been a flurry of activity in the wake of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s proposal to treat venture capital firms the same as hedge funds, by making them register as investment advisors with the SEC (see my original post).
The National Venture Capital Assn. response seems to be taking three forms: Reject new regulations, eliminate new requirements for smaller VC firms and limit additional information required by the SEC.
In my last post, I reported on the recent inaugural Medical Device Connectivity Conference and Exhibition. While I mentioned the IEC and ISO efforts at creating connectivity standards, it seems that I left out another group that is working on this as well: ASTM.
Boston recently played host to the first-ever conference dedicated to the integration of medical devices and information systems, the Inaugural Medical Device Connectivity Conference and Exhibition.
The conference, which attracted more than 200 attendees and dealt with the technical and clinical issues associated with acquiring, pooling, and interpreting data from various medical devices, was especially timely considering a key aspect of the latest Obama gold rush (AKA the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (PDF)).
In a follow-up to an ongoing saga in Washington, the House and Senate are considering several bills which are miles apart in their treatment of whether VC-backed companies should be eligible for SBIR funds. Although I’m not a legal expert, I thought that it might be interesting to break them down in order to better understand them.
At the recent Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, the tag line was “The recovery starts here.” And for the day, for some 400-plus attendees, the recovery did in fact feel like it had started.
