Photo courtesy of MediCoventures
Arizona Medical Systems (AMS) was founded by Arizona’s very own Interventional Cardiologist and inventor, Richard Heuser, MD. Dr. Heuser has received many patents and awards in the past for ideas he has invented, but his latest award was a testament to the collaborative efforts found in Arizona. Just last week he was recognized with the “Top Cardiovascular Innovation Award” from the Cardiovascular Research Technologies conference in Washington DC.
Dr. Heuser had several ideas he was working on as a company he called AMS, but his ideas were in need of funding and a management team. In 2012 Dr. Heuser looked to BioAccel, a local seed fund, for potential funding for his ideas. While BioAccel was interested in supporting him, they required a management team to be in place that could do the day-to-day work and value-add they knew Dr. Heuser and his company would need. They in turn partnered with MediCoventures, to manage the technologies and company vision.
The magic that occurred, was that by combining the funding from BioAccel, the capabilities and management resources of MediCoventures and the clinical validation and needs identification from Dr. Heuser, AMS began to change and accelerate.
“We make it a point to focus first on the market and clinical need dynamics rather than just inventing ideas in a vacuum. Within the first few months of having aligned the right resources for AMS, we were able to develop something we felt better addressed those needs,” said Aaron Call, founding Partner at MediCoventures.
The result, a technology known as the Punctual Guidewire was developed and is a novel and elegant approach to the vascular access that is constantly used during interventional cardiology procedures. The technology has been prototyped, utilized in a pre-clinical study and has been issued three patents from the US patent office; a feat Dr. Heuser can contest would never have happened on his own.
“Aaron and Kelvin, at MediCoventures, took the clinical needs I identified and with the funds from BioAccel we were able to create a product that was far better than all the other concepts I had been working on by myself,” stated Dr. Heuser.
The Cardiovascular Technology Conference (CRT2016) strives to give exposure to the latest advances in technologies by doing a call for new inventions every year. This year, approximately 20 new technologies were submitted to the conference and AMS’s Punctual Guidewire received third place with the “Top Cardiovascular Innovation Award” for the entire conference. To AMS and the collaborative team this was a great validation of their effort towards building something the industry wants.
“It has been so great to work with Dr. Heuser,” says MediCoventures’ founding Partner, Kelvin Ning. “As a physician, he knew the value this technology could have in his industry. To see him recognized for his efforts by a conference of his peers and for us to play a collaborative role in the effort is very rewarding,”
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This story is re-posted with permission from MediCoventures.