Micro Interventional Devices: Creating A Tool Box For Structural Heart Disease

Article preview from IN VIVO - June, 2012

Micro Interventional Devices was founded around opportunities in addressing the procedural challenges that limit patient access to transcatheter heart valves. The company’s initial focus is on developing a transcatheter valve for the replacement of the mitral valve, and an easy and effective transapical access and closure method for transcatheter mitral and aortic valve procedures. The company’s mission, though, is to broadly focus on advancing structural heart disease treatments, and MID’s first-generation technology has potential application to several areas of structural heart disease, including PFO/atrial septal defect closure, left atrial appendage closure and cardiac ablations.

 

Micro Interventional Devices: Creating A Tool Box For Structural Heart Disease

Article preview from IN VIVO - June, 2012

In this 30-year medical device career, Michael Whitman has been involved with several disruptive technologies that have changed the practice of medicine. In 1995 Whitman was working at Johnson & Johnson Interventional Systems Co., the developer and manufacturer of the first coronary stent, when J&J acquired Cordis Corp. and became the market leader in percutaneous coronary intervention. He subsequently founded Power Medical Interventions (PMI), to help advance the evolution of minimally invasive general surgery by developing intelligent surgical instruments to make it easier to do laparoscopic surgeries, including single-port laparoscopy and NOTES (natural orifice transluminal endoscopy.) According to Whitman, “Whenever there is a disruptive or transformative technology, there is often a need to create peripheral devices around it to support it.” He points out that when stents were launched, stent delivery systems had to be improved, and ultimately the stents themselves improved, transforming into drug-eluting stents. Whitman has spent his career working to fill these kinds of gaps. In 2009, after Covidien Ltd. bought Power Medical Interventions, he was looking for the next disruptive opportunity and decided the time was right to create an enabling platform around structural heart disease.

Two years earlier, the first transcatheter aortic valve, Sapien (from Edwards Lifesciences Corp.), had been launched in Europe, and it was closely followed by the CoreValve from Medtronic Inc. These new devices, which can be implanted without open heart surgery, help patients with aortic stenosis that are too frail or too sick for surgery to benefit from a replacement heart valve. Now the field has accumulated some ten years of experience in Europe (including clinical trials begun by Edwards in 2002), time enough to identify some of the opportunities that accompany these breakthrough technologies and make them easier to perform. Such improvements may even expand the potential patient population for these new devices. It is these new opportunities in structural heart disease upon which Whitman’s new company, Micro Interventional Devices Inc. (MID), has set its sights.

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