David Auth: Riding Heart Technology's Roller Coaster
Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - September 2008
Heart Technology, Inc. is one of the great success stories in medical devices over the past 20 years. But you'd never have predicted that given the company's early experiences. In Vivo interviews the company's founder, David Auth.
Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - September 2008
David Auth: Riding Heart Technology's Roller Coaster
by David Cassak
There are so many ways a medical device company can run into trouble: delays and wrong paths in technology development, indifferent or unresponsive venture capitalists, product recalls, technology obsolescence, clinical leapfrogs, a difficult regulatory path, shareholder lawsuits—the list goes on and on. It's tough enough for companies to come back from one or two of these setbacks. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Seattle-based Heart Technology Inc. faced virtually all of them. And yet despite that—or perhaps because of it—Heart Technology is one of the great success stories of the past 20 years.
Much--if not all--of the credit for the success of Heart Technology, one of the early pioneers in atherectomy, goes to the company's founder, David Auth. But if Heart Technology's experience were typical, though somewhat in extremis, of what medical device companies go through, Auth himself is hardly a typical device entrepreneur. An indifferent student in biology in high school—Auth says of himself that he was "good at tinkering and figuring things out, but wasn't good at memorizing genus and species"—Auth's interest turned to chemistry and physics, which he pursued through college and graduate school. In 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of Washington, not as a physics professor, but as a professor of electrical engineering because the school was trying to develop a program in electrophysics and optics and optical technology in general as part of its electrical engineering program. A relatively late starter, for much of his early career, Auth was more of an academic than an entrepreneur.
A series of fortuitous meetings and relationships led Auth eventually to a sideline helping to develop innovative medical devices—indeed the Heart Technology Rotablator atherectomy tool was far from Auth's first successful device. But much of Auth's early device development went to making others, including companies like ACMI, Boston Scientific Corp., and Olympus Corp. rich, while he lived off an academic's salary. It wasn't until Heart Technology that Auth himself struck gold in medical devices.
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Companies mentioned in this article:
Boston Scientific Corp.
Heart Technology Inc.
Hologic Inc.
Cytyc Corp.
Novacept Inc.
Olympus Corp.
Pathway Medical Technologies Inc.
Stanford University
University of Washington
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