The Medical Device Business Journal — Medical Device News & Articles | MassDevice
You could forgive Michael Mussallem if he didn’t want to bid farewell to 2010.
While the rest of us were still trying to pull our heads out of the lingering effects of the so-called “Great Recession,” the 57-year-old chief executive of Edwards LifeSciences Corp. (NYSE:EW) was busy watching his company clean up on Wall Street and set itself up for a sweet run this year.
More than 20 years ago, David Muller led a revolution in the world of vision correction.
As chairman and CEO of Summit Technology, he led a team that brought the first excimer laser through the Food & Drug Administration for use in reshaping the cornea. The technology, later dubbed Lasik, is a worldwide phenomenon and has helped tens of millions of patients shed glasses and contact lenses.
Decades later, Muller is at it again as the chief executive of Waltham, Mass.-based Avedro Inc., looking to finish what he started, this time with a new vision correction procedure he says will make Lasik safer and more effective.
Restoring vision to the blind is the sort of feat reserved for ancient religious texts and modern science fiction novels. But a company in Germany did just that with an eye implant.
Retina Implant AG is in the process of developing a sub-Retina Implant, designed to be inserted into the eye to treat back-of-the-eye disorders. A first clinical trial showed that the device can enable people suffering from a certain type of macular degeneration to see. The patients had retinitus pigmentosa, an inherited and incurable degenerative condition that causes tunnel vision and often, eventually, complete blindness. Retina Implant estimates that the condition affects about 200,000 people in the U.S. and Europe.
The term “liberated information” may sound like it was taken from a science fiction novel, but to General Electric’s (NYSE:GE) Earl Jones, it’s a means to improve access and quality to healthcare while at the same time making it cheaper. Jones is the vice president and general manager of the eHealth division of GE Healthcare, overseeing the development of information technology platforms that customers ranging from small doctors’ offices to state governments are implementing into their everyday operations.
The man Stanford University once dubbed “The Mickey Mantle of medical device inventors” still has his swing, or at least his sway in the industry, judging by the reaction Dr. Thomas Fogarty received in Boston recently at a round-table discussion of medical device innovation.
For William Hawkins, Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT) runs in the family.
Inside his corner office at the Fridley, Minn.-based medical device goliath, Hawkins, chairman and CEO of one of the world’s largest medical device companies, keeps a picture of two customers he says not only shaped how he sees his company but how he sees the world.
InfraReDx Inc. is on a roll this fall. The Burlington, Mass.-based medical device maker won 510(k) clearance from the Food & Drug Administration in early September for its LipiScan IVUS coronary imaging system and pulled in $21 million in an equity offering a month later, which it plans to use to fund the U.S. rollout of the device.
The LipiScan IVUS uses both so-called “near-infrared” spectroscopy and intravascular ultrasound technology to give cardiologists a grayscale IVUS image of a coronary artery, along with a map of lipid core coronary plaques within a blood vessel.
