Article preview from IN VIVO - March, 2013
Noted physician/entrepreneur John Simpson is back. His latest company, Avinger, has finally achieved his long-sought goal: combining imaging and therapeutics in catheter technology for crossing CTOs. Will clinical innovation be enough to reward Avinger in an increasingly economically focused medtech world?
Article preview from IN VIVO - March, 2013
With the medtech industry facing perhaps its most challenging time in terms of start-up development, no one would have begrudged John Simpson, MD, PhD, the luxury of retiring from the device industry in 2007 following the sale of his seventh company, atherectomy developer FoxHollow Technologies Inc., to ev3 Inc. (now part of Covidien Ltd.) for $780 million. Certainly after nearly 30 years in medtech, Simpson had earned the right to spend more time with his family – now up to 17 children and grandchildren ( and on the golf course. While he never has considered himself a businessman, preferring to focus on the clinical side of the house and leave the business to others, Simpson has established an unrivaled entrepreneurial record, both in terms of clinical and financial accomplishments. In addition to pioneering coronary angioplasty by developing over-the-wire delivery technology in his first company, Advanced Cardiovascular Systems Inc. (ACS), which helped give rise to interventional cardiology, his companies were responsible for clinical breakthroughs in atherectomy, intravascular ultrasound, and vascular closure, among other areas, and all were acquired, for a total of more than $1.8 billion.
But Simpson still had some unfinished business to attend to. It has long been his dream to develop technology that could provide physicians with real-time visualization capability within an artery during the course of treating that vessel. He saw this as a benefit for a variety of potential applications, most notably treating chronic total occlusions (CTOs). Despite previous efforts in some of his other companies, he was never able to achieve that goal, in part because his design was well ahead of the state of the component technology needed to fulfill that vision.
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