Article preview from IN VIVO - March 01, 2011
MD Start, a European medical device incubator, was launched in 2009 as a collaboration between medtech giant Medtronic Inc. and Paris-based venture firm Sofinnova Partners, to help European physicians bring their ideas to market. The incubator announces two new shareholders in the venture, reinforcing both its US and European connections: Milan-based cardiovascular leader Sorin Group SPA and US venture firm Versant Ventures.
Article preview from IN VIVO - March 01, 2011
MD Start, a European medical device incubator launched in 2009 as a collaboration between medtech giant Medtronic Inc. and Paris-based venture firm Sofinnova Partners, has announced two new shareholders in the venture, reinforcing both its US and European connections: Milan-based cardiovascular leader Sorin Group SPA and US venture firm Versant Ventures.
MD Start CEO Tim Lenihan founded the incubator along with Gérard Hascoët in an effort, in particular, to help European physicians bring their ideas to market. A former US device executive, Lenihan moved to Europe in the mid 1990s and, in 2000, started a contract development and manufacturing firm, Contract Medical International (CMI), based in Dresden. At CMI, Lenihan says he came across inventors with a lot of great ideas. But unlike their US counterparts, European physicians "are rarely if ever willing to give up their day jobs" as either clinicians or academics, he says. "Some of them were so passionate, they were willing to pay out of their own pocket" to do some early prototyping, but they didn't really have the resources to turn those ideas into companies. MD Start offers them a vehicle for product development that hopefully will lead to funding and company creation.
Over the years, Lenihan says he would informally take some of the more promising ideas he saw to VCs, including Sofinnova, "but the projects were usually so early, there wasn't even a CEO." Sofinnova, by itself, funded an early incubator-like initiative with Lenihan, which was formalized when MD Start was launched with the initial collaboration between Sofinnova and Medtronic.
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