Having recently been involved as Co-Founder and CEO of a successful start-up, SoundBite Medical Solutions, a shockwave energy technology coming out of the University of Sherbrooke, I am familiar with the fun, work and critical steps and activities that lay ahead for ViTAA - and I know what a green light from key opinion leaders (KOLs) looks like…
We were just beginning the commercialization process as we entered the New Year 2020. Little did I know that the COVID crisis loomed, however.
One last important milestone lay ahead: spending some time with various American KOLs at a very important conference in Houston in early March of this year. Several hundred of the world’s leading vascular surgeons and endovascular interventionists would be there, and with Dr. Randy Moore’s extensive clinical network, I knew there would be no problem setting up appointments with the leading KOL’s.
One thing I learned through my many cardiovascular start-up experiences was that you had only minutes to capture their interest and curiosity.
Doing this for ViTAA – as with any new company - meant coming into the meeting completely prepared with a technology pitch and a game plan for the USA that made sense to them.
But more importantly, at the beginning of each one-on-one KOL meeting, I made it a point to understand their personal as well as their professional profiles, and would start off with an innocuous question about one or the other (or both) and that any form of business discussion would be deferred to future meetings.
After four very positive sessions with major KOL’s from Harvard, Chapel Hill, University of Alabama and Texas Heart, it became even clearer that the unmet need for better mapping technology was significant. These meetings, combined with several panel sessions on the topics of the clinical complication issues associated with endovascular aortic repair (EVAR), strongly suggested a huge clinical need and associated business opportunity!
My excitement increased by the minute, and reminded me of the feelings I experienced as CEO of CryoCath when I began to realize that AF (atrial fibrillation) ablation was on the cusp of explosive growth. AF diagnosis and treatment was about to be extricated from the shadows, and the millions of AF patients in North America who had been largely ignored by the medical community were about to be saved from years of anxiety (AF patients, prior to the use of ablation, were five times more likely to suffer a stroke) and uncomfortable drug maintenance regimens.
Because of breakthrough diagnostic and therapeutic technologies like CryoCath, AF ablation in North America grew dramatically from 50,000 procedures per year in the early 2000’s to over 1 million annual procedures more recently. Monetizing this growth paid off accordingly, with industry revenues skyrocketing from $500 million US to over $3 billion in less than 10 years!
Having lived through that unprecedented era, I can now see that same thing happening with aortic aneurysm (AA), a disease affecting millions of largely ignored North Americans. I say “largely ignored” because there is a lack of safe and effective diagnostic and therapeutic technologies to deal with this potentially lethal disease.
Flying back from Houston (exactly six days before the COVID lockdown) I counted my lucky stars that I was about to experience a second transformational process to better manage a major cardiovascular disease.
ViTAA was on its “launching pad”, much the same way that CryoCath was 15 years ago.
My mind now moved on to the next step - developing and executing a financing game plan.