October 2022 issue
October 31, 2022 | Executives from west coast medical device firms assembled in Santa Clara, CA earlier this month for the DeviceTalks West Conference. The two-day event was produced by WTWH Media, publisher of MassDevice, Medical Design & Outsourcing magazine, and other healthcare industry publications.
On the first day, Action Potential VC partner Juan-Pablo Mas spoke on a panel devoted to investment. Brett Wall, president of Medtronic’s neuroscience portfolio, gave a keynote talk on the second day. He began with some stories about founder Earl Bakken’s experiences in the early days of Medtronic. Wall related the company’s mission statement, drafted by Bakken in 1960.
“Our mission statement talks about the personal worth and value of the employee, about being a good corporate citizen in the communities where we work and live, about making a fair profit, and using our expertise to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life. It also tells us that where we don’t have expertise, don’t go there,” he said.
Wall said that Medtronic currently has 95,000 employees and spends about $2.7 billion annually on research and development.
Wall described the company’s efforts in bioelectronic medicine, highlighting three key areas in his portfolio: brain modulation, spinal cord stimulation, and sacral nerve stimulation. He was optimistic about the company’s new tibial nerve stimulation system for treating overactive bladder, hinting that it could potentially achieve the same rate of success as sacral nerve stimulation.
Referring to Medtronic’s brain modulation product line, Wall highlighted Medtronic’s BrainSense technology, which he said helps deliver a more personalized form of neuromodulation therapy. “It allows us see very precisely what the patient’s drug regimen is. We can then titrate the stimulation so that we can keep the patient right where they should be,” he said.
Wall showed videos of two Parkinson’s patients before and after their DBS system is turned on to demonstrate the effectiveness of the company’s Activa therapy. He also previewed the company’s future SCS system, called Inceptiv, which uses ECAP-based closed-loop stimulation that can be used with multiple different waveforms. It also offers a high degree of therapy personalization. He offered an example of how the closed-loop stimulation regimen could prevent patients from receiving painful excess stimulation. “When you place the lead near the spinal cord, it always moves,” he explained. “What ECAPs can do is interdict the signal. If you’re driving down the road and you hit a pothole at 50 miles per hour. It will respond within milliseconds. It will rapidly interdict the stimulation—drop out the signal momentarily—so you don’t have that painful overstimulation.
Wall stressed the importance that Medtronic’s sensing and data collection systems would have on future therapies. “Ultimately, the data that we get with this system is going to be as important as the device itself. It’s going to allow us to understand exactly what’s happening and how we need to change therapy,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re talking about healthcare for you, but doing it at scale.”
In a panel devoted to how medical device R&D is embracing new technologies, Cala Health founder and CSO Kate Rosenbluth was joined by David Noonan, CTO of Moon Surgical, and Daniel Hawkins, CEO of Avail Medsystems. Rosenbluth pointed out that new technologies could help startups get up to speed more rapidly than their predecessors in medtech and pharma. “Software and digital are really great democratizers, great equalizers,” she said. “It’s incredibly exciting to see how we can actually scale a lot of innovation in this sector.”
Hawkins agreed with Rosenbluth’s assessment. “It’s really a software world. There so much opportunity in software within healthcare that’s yet to be unlocked,” he said.
Avail’s telepresence platform allows real-time communication between medical professionals, regardless of location, especially within a surgical suite. The Medical University of South Carolina’s neurosurgery department recently implemented the company’s equipment to assist in stroke procedures.
Hawkins said Avail tries to incorporate the very best technological elements—optics, screens, video controllers—in their systems. “There’s some extraordinary things that can happen by taking the best of elements from other parts of the broad technology ecosystem and mashing them up,” he said.
