Prescient Medical's Dual Approach to Vulnerable Plaque

Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - June 2008

Headed by the team that pioneered the coronary stent, Prescient is using a medical imaging breakthrough and a unique financing strategy to succeed where other device companies have failed: detecting and treating vulnerable plaque.

• Vulnerable plaque caught investors' and entrepreneurs' attention several years ago as the mysterious cause of more than half of all sudden cardiac death, most of which occurs in people with no history of heart disease.

• Several companies were launched and much money invested with little to show for it. One major problem: vulnerable plaque requires new tools both to diagnose and treat the condition, which proved to be bigger hurdles than most start-ups can overcome.

• Prescient was launched by an experienced device management team specifically to address the problem of vulnerable plaque, without a bias toward any technology platform.

• The company is the first to apply a particular imaging approach, Raman spectroscopy, to coronary disease as the basis of its diagnostic tool, and is using a shield—not a stent—for its therapeutic device.

Marvin Woodall has an extremely high standard for judging success, particularly his own. The retired president of what was then called Johnson & Johnson Interventional Systems (JJIS, whose products now largely reside within Cordis Corp., a Johnson & Johnson operating company), he is regarded as among the most accomplished of device industry executives, having directed the initial development and growth of one of the industry's true blockbuster products—the coronary stent. Enjoying retirement and working on his golf game out of his Doylestown, Pennsylvania, home, Woodall was approached with a potential opportunity to treat an unmet clinical need that caused him to reevaluate the success that the coronary stent had achieved in terms of patient care, a reevaluation that would eventually bring him out of retirement and back into the cardiovascular device industry.

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