![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() "What we're seeing is more medical device and digital health companies reaching a significant scale in Israel that we did not see 10 years ago," says Ittai Harel, managing general partner at Pitango. MindUP founding-partner, Pitango, is one of Israel's biggest venture capital firm which has invested in some of the country's most successful home-grown medical device companies such as EarlySense Ltd., LifeBond Ltd. Paul Hermes, entrepreneur in residence Surgical Innovations, Medtronic The MindUP venture made sense for Medtronic as we'd had good experiences of business in Israel and were interested in the idea of casting our net a bit wider and the leverage that could be brought from partners like Pitango and the Israel Innovation Authority." Hermes adds that a recent Israeli visit by Medtronic's CEO Omar Ishrak is "testament to our confidence in the technologies" in the country. Medtronic is trying to move beyond gadgets to more holistic solutions that can advance care and improve value based healthcare. "Medtronic's engagement with MindUP and this community in Israel is about finding answers to problems. These are the types of technologies that Medtronic want to invest in because that’s one of our biggest areas of focus and the legacy from the Covidien business is moving surgery from open, invasive surgery to less invasive procedures – which can include robot- assisted tools."Īs a member of MindUP's board of directors, Hermes is searching for "big ideas" that can have the biggest impact in healthcare. "At Medtronic we are focused on technologies that can help more surgeons do minimally invasive surgery. "Robotics is a large and rapidly growing field and surgical robotics is a huge opportunity because today there's only really one company that's doing it," says Hermes. (Also see " Market Intel: Ever Decreasing Dimensions, Snakes And Origami: The Next-Gen Surgical Robots" - Medtech Insight, 28 Feb, 2017.) Meanwhile, the pace of technological advances in this field has quickened with smaller players developing novel technologies that allow robotics to be used for surgery on different, previously-hard-to-operate parts of the anatomy. (Also see " Robotic-Assisted Surgery: Taking MIS By Storm" - Medtech Insight, 26 May, 2016.) This field has attracted other medtech heavyweights like Johnson & Johnson, which partnered with Verily Life Sciences ( Google Inc.’s former life sciences subsidiary) in March 2015 to form a robotic-assisted surgical platform which was publicly launched as Verb Surgical Inc. The company's systems are primarily used in gynecologic, general, urologic, cardiothoracic, and head and neck surgery. remains the longtime market leader and in 2015 alone, reported $2.38bn in revenues and 652,000 procedures performed with its da Vinci Surgical System. Interest in the robotics surgical space has ramped up significantly in the last few years as companies hope to capture a share of the market, which is projected to reach more than $10bn by 2021. Hermes joined Medtronic through its $50bn blockbuster acquisition of Covidien for the last four years, he has been leading the team that is developing Medtronic’s first surgical robot, a project which was first launched at a pre-acquisition Covidien, in a bid to increase the company's access to the minimally invasive surgery market. It's the ideal platform to nurture innovative new technologies, says Paul Hermes, entrepreneur-in-residence at Medtronic's Surgical Innovations unit and a board member of MindUP. Through the two-year incubator program, entrepreneurs are promised "360-degree support" to help develop fully fledged companies that can reach market. As Israel's first incubator dedicated to digital health innovation, the program is focused on investment in the areas of big data, predictive analytics, telemedicine, cloud computing, wearable and implantable sensors, advanced point of care diagnostics and personalized medicine. MindUP, a joint venture between Medtronic PLC, IBM, Pitango Venture Capital, Impact 1st Investments and Rambam Medical Center started activities in March 2016. With the explosion of Israeli digital health innovation in recent years, it was merely a matter of time before big players began to sit up and take notice. EU Biosimilar Filings, Opinions & Approvals.Drug Review Pathways & Approval Standards. ![]()
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