Teleflex Medical CEO Benson Smith’s career has taken him from door-to-door salesman to CEO of 1 of the top performing medical device companies in the past five years. Along the way he made films, wrote a book and, as you’ll hear in this podcast, went to extreme lengths to get a job. In this interview, […]
Special Content
A new frontier in the war on brain cancer with NovoCure chairman Bill Doyle
Novocure, the St. Helier, Jersey-based medical device company, which raised more than $158M in an IPO last year, is trying to change the way we fight cancer. Company officials say its proprietary Tumor Treating Fields technology, marketed under the product name Optune, are a new tool in the war against cancer. Currently, the company has […]
DeviceTalks Podcast: Cohera Medical CEO Patrick Daly
Before Patrick Daly was tapped as chairman of AdvaMed’s Accel unit, which represents emerging medical device companies, the CEO of Cohera Medical sat down with MassDevice.com Executive Editor Brad Perriello at DeviceTalks Raleigh. Daly, who founded the absorbable surgical adhesives and sealants company in 2006, has led 4 funding rounds totaling $75M in capital and […]
Bill Hawkins on his time at Medtronic, Immucor and 25 years in the hot seat | DeviceTalks podcast
For nearly a quarter of a century, William “Bill” Hawkins sat in the corner office of medtech companies of all sizes, before stepping down from Immucor last year to become the Atlanta-based company’s lead director. Hawkins is best known for his 4 years as CEO of Medtronic, where he served in the corner office from […]
Can Sirtex turn cancer into a chronic disease?
Big things sometimes come in small packages. For Sirtex Medical, big things come in a really small package. The Australian medical device company’s flagship product – SIR-Spheres® Y-90 resin microspheres – is made up of 30 million to 60 million microspheres about the size of a grain of sand, which are injected into the hepatic artery and […]
A medtech veteran takes on C. diff from the gut
Most people don’t think much about Clostridium difficile, or C. diff., until it impacts their family. That was the case for Rebiotix CEO Lee Jones, who had never heard of the disease until her mother fell ill with it several years ago. Lee says she quickly learned how dangerous the disease really is – it’s responsible for more than 29,000 […]
The leadership lessons of John Brown, the man who built Stryker
For a man who took a company from $17 million in sales to a $4.5 billion publicly traded juggernaut listed at #307 on Forbes 400 billionaires, John Brown is a remarkably humble man. He’s also, for all intents and purposes, the man who put Stryker (NYSE:SYK) on the map during his 32-year tenure as CEO, […]
Can Greg Lucier bring the Life Technologies mojo to NuVasive?
Newly minted NuVasive CEO Greg Lucier has quite the pedigree when it comes to building successful companies. Lucier, who was named permanent CEO of the San Diego, Calif.-based spinal device company in May 2015, built Life Technologies from a start up (then named Invitrogen) to a global biotech juggernaut with 12,000 employees and just under […]
How Exact Sciences built a DNA screening test for colorectal cancer
In a seemingly endless war on cancer, the best weapon remains early detection, according to Graham Lidgard, senior vice president of R&D at Exact Sciences Corp. For Lidgard, and the rest of the team at the Madison, Wisc.-based molecular diagnostics maker, the battlefield is colorectal cancer, 1 of the most common, and deadliest, cancers in […]
Marie Johnson and the mission to prevent sudden heart attack deaths
Marie Johnson never had any intention of becoming the CEO of a medical device company with a mission of “changing the world,” but then again she never had any intention of becoming a widow with 2 small children either. In 2002, Johnson, CEO and founder of Northfield, Minn.-based Aum Cardiovascular was a PhD student when […]
Exit interview: Stephen Ubl on moving on from AdvaMed
Before Stephen Ubl departed for a job as the chief lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, medtech’s main man in Washington, D.C., sat down with MassDevice.com publisher Brian Johnson to reflect on his time at AdvaMed. Ubl worked 16 years at the Advanced Medical Technology Assn., spending the last 10 years as president & CEO, raising the medical device industry’s national […]