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Medtech developments can cut through healthcare problems exacerbated by the pandemic, a ground-breaking European summit near London was told.
Those at the LSI (Life Science Intelligence) Europe ’22 – Emerging Medtech Summit also learned that investors now recognise the increasingly rapid progress and results in the medtech sector.
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This follows pressure and failures suffered by established healthcare systems during the COVID pandemic, prompting calls for de-centralisation, innovation at the point of care, and greater concentration on prevention and early intervention cures.
Specifically, Britain’s new PM Liz Truss was advised to inject “more intelligence into the NHS (National Health Service)” rather than simply pouring in more cash.
The call came from the summit’s keynote speaker, Bernd Montag, CEO of Siemens Healthineers – one of the NHS’s biggest suppliers – who wants to see more of his company’s scanning devices deployed to help spot conditions such as cancer before they require acute or end of life care.
Pre-emptive and ‘right first time’ care were recurring themes at the four-day summit (Sept 21-24) the first European version of LSI’s highly influential annual summits in California (next one: March 20-23, 2023) said to have transformed medtech sector growth in the USA over the past decade.
The European event attracted 450 international attendees, plus 2,000 logging into the livestreams, which included headline medtech speakers and specialist panellists, and gathered the medtech industry’s most innovative start-ups.
Investors ranged from established healthcare giants looking for acquisitions, to venture capitalists and family offices seeking medtech equity opportunities, as well as equity crowdfunding from retail and accredited investors seeking early access to medtech equivalents of Oculus VR, Brewdog or Peloton, which raised hundreds of millions this way while maintaining their private company status.
There were candidates raising capital using a combination of equity crowdfunding and Regulation D investment offerings, notably Medical21 and McGinley Orthopedics, with both companies pitching solutions into multi-billion-dollar markets.
Medical 21 Founder and CEO Manny Villafaña, PhDSc, arrived at the summit buoyed by news that his company had just received a $20 million investment pledge from a family office, which could only supercharge Medical21’s existing $40 million equity crowdfunding raise.
Villafaña’s latest product is designed to disrupt a heart by-pass surgery market alone valued at $10 billion a year, while his previous cardiovascular innovations positively impacted over 15 million heart patients and led to three exits delivering $57.4 billion in shareholder value, through acquisitions by the likes of Abbott, Boston Scientific, and Medtronic.
Following these breakthroughs against heart disease – mankind’s No.1 killer, claiming 17 million lives globally every year – Villafaña has now created a manmade heart graft that can not only simplify more than a million heart by-pass surgeries every year, while avoiding the need to ‘harvest’ blood vessel grafts from the patient’s own legs or arms.
The latter is painful and intrusive at a time when the patient needs to recover from the major impact of the heart surgery itself.
McGinley Orthopedics, manufactures IntelliSense HandHeld Robotics, designed to transform the $7.4 billion surgery equipment market through a newly-launched $40million Regulation A+ equity crowdfunding investment offering.
Its flagship solutions are the IntelliSense Drill and the Lever Action Plate System, enabling high precision treatment of common joint injuries, notably the wrist and ankle fractures frequently suffered in sport, or by older patients whose bone densities have declined.
The Lever Action Plate system, for instance, enables a broken wrist to be re-positioned precisely and mend without future complications, but McGinley Orthopedics also expects to expand into the highly sensitive cranial and spinal surgery fields, where its devices can deliver the pinpoint accuracy required.
CEO and Founder Joseph McGinley said: “With better engineering, come better outcomes for patients as we have taken all the guesswork out of the operating room.
“With our technology you can fully trust your surgeon because you can trust their orthopedic tools, built to a new gold standard. This new-found accuracy is taking unnecessary pain away from patients with right first-time procedures.”
Reviewing the summit, LSI President, CEO and Founder Scott Pantel said: “This was our first time we have brought our medtech summit to Europe and we were over-subscribed. We are already making plans for next year.
“Over 100 leading Medtech innovators presented and we hope that we have helped coalescence investment and innovation in a European medtech sector, comprising 27,000 companies employing 675,000 people, the biggest players being Germany (210,000 employees), the UK (100,000) and France (85,000).
Europe’s medtech powerhouse can attract even greater investment to make a really big impact on healthcare in a world shown to be cruelly exposed to major health threats.”
- Registrations are already being taken for the LSI USA ’23 Emerging Medtech Summit at Dana Point, California (March 20-23, 2023)
