Absorption Systems LP is well-positioned in several sense of the word. The Exton, Pa. and San Diego-based contract research organization managed to expand during the Great Recession, buying medical device toxicology firm Perry Scientific last summer.
MassDevice Q&A
MassDevice Q&A: Accuray president and CEO Euan Thomson
Accuray Inc. (NSDQ:ARAY) has a tough row to hoe: Cultivate a market that crosses medical specialty lines for a product that costs millions. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company’s CyberKnife system is a pioneering device in radiosurgery, using precisely targeted, massive doses of X-ray radiation to non-invasively destroy tumors.
MassDevice Q&A: Cook Medical vice president Rob Lyles
Cook Medical Group and Boston Scientific Corp. (NYSE:BSX) both got their start with catheter-based devices, but the medical device giants’ similarities don’t stop there. As Boston Scientific founder John Abele told MassDevice last month, his firm got its start in an unlikely place: the basement of a Catholic Church in Belmont, Mass.
MassDevice Q&A: Abiomed CEO Michael Minogue
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: LifeImage CEO Hamid Tabatabaie
If you’ve ever had a CT scan, X-ray or MRI, you were likely given a CD to tote around in case you wanted a second opinion. That’s because there isn’t a universal network or database for medical image files, even in an industry that demands standardization.
MassDevice Q&A: John Abele, Part II
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: Boston Scientific co-founder John Abele
There aren’t many multi-billion-dollar companies that can say they got their start in the basement of a Catholic church rectory. Still fewer can claim a connection to a famous Czech mystic credited with pioneering research into human consciousness (and, not incidentally, with inventing the steerable catheter).
But according to co-founder John Abele, Boston Scientific Corp. (NYSE:BSX) can. The Natick, Mass.-based medical device maker got its start with the steerable catheter invented by Itzhak Bentov, leveraging the platform into a family of catheter-based products that changed the way medicine is practiced.
MassDevice Q&A: Practice Fusion founder and CEO Ryan Howard
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: OmniGuide chairman Yoel Fink
When Yoel Fink began his groundbreaking work with mirrors at MIT in the late 1990’s, he didn’t know he would be creating a material that would be used to carry lasers into areas as hard to reach as the inner ear or brain. He was working on a problem that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the U.S. military, wanted solved. For reasons still unknown to Fink, DARPA wanted large-area, low-cost surfaces more reflective than a mirror that could reflect light from all angles. Eventually, his work led to a PhD thesis and OmniGuide, the company where he is currently chairman. OmniGuide, which employs 120 workers, just last week celebrated its 10th year of business.
MassDevice Q&A: Molecular Biometrics CEO Jim Posillico
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: Levitronix CEO Kurt Dasse
Kurt Dasse, the CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Levitronix, counts a stint as chief scientific office for Thermo Electron Corp., better known today as Thermo Fisher Scientific as key to his professional career. His tenure at Thermo proved fateful, as it was there that Dasse came under the wing of the legendary George Hatsopoulos and his fervent devotion to starting new companies.
