Creating J&J;'s Cardiology Franchise: An Interview with Marv Woodall

Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - January 2009

Find out how the architect of J&J's cardiology business reflects on the ups and downs of building a stent business, integrating a hostile takeover, and why—despite all their success—stents have not met their original goal.

Creating J&J's Cardiology Franchise: An Interview with Marv Woodall

Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - January 2009

Johnson & Johnson has been among the leaders in interventional cardiology devices for so long that its presence is seen as one of the immutable forces in the industry. It would be hard to imagine a cardiology market without J&J. That image owes largely to the fact that the company pioneered the development and commercialization of coronary stents, one of the device industry's few true blockbuster products.

But many people may not recall that J&J was not among the first wave of companies to capitalize on the initial interventional cardiology boom that resulted from the introduction of balloon angioplasty, the procedure that essentially created this new clinical specialty. J&J was late to the party, lacking any cardiology products or market presence until 1988, 10 years after the first coronary angioplasty was performed in the US. At that point, the company's senior management decided they needed to enter the cardiology market and tabbed Marvin L. Woodall, a rising young executive who had come up through the sales ranks to run several businesses at J&J, to head this new undertaking, which was initially called Johnson & Johnson Interventional Systems (JJIS).

Woodall ran this group for 13 years, managing through some of the most tumultuous product markets in the industry's history. Most striking, of course, is the phenomenal success of the Palmaz-Schatz stent, the first coronary stent approved in the US. This product introduction created a blockbuster market for these devices that J&J initially had to itself, only to eventually lose its market domination just as dramatically. Woodall also laid the foundation for J&J's re-emergence as the leader in the stent market by creating the product development program that led to the company introducing Cypher, the first drug-eluting stent, after his retirement.

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Companies mentioned in this article:

Boston Scientific Corp.

Cardiovascular Research Foundation

Johnson & Johnson

Cordis Corp.

Ethicon Inc.

Prescient Medical Inc.

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