January 2024 edition: The Leadership in Medtech issue

Leadership and innovation in medtech

Creativity, energy, agility — those are three words Recor Medical CEO Lara Barghout used to describe the culture at the world’s first device developer to win FDA approval for hypertension-treating renal denervation (RDN).

You can add persistence to that list. Ever since its founding in 2009, Recor Medical and its team has been pushing to deliver a safe and effective RDN system. The seemingly long odds got longer as larger competitors pulled the plug on their own programs — or in Medtronic’s case, pushed on despite clinical trial failures and won approval shortly after Recor.

Our annual Leadership in Medtech issue of Medical Design & Outsourcing features lessons from leaders at Recor and Medtronic. Both teams were propelled by faith in their technology’s ability to help tens or hundreds of millions of hypertension patients avoid strokes, heart attacks and other serious health risks linked to high blood pressure.

Our cover features another device developer similarly striving to break new ground. Synchron is testing a catheter-placed brain implant in severely paralyzed patients to let them communicate via text and control smart devices. Co-founder and CEO Dr. Tom Oxley discusses this minimally invasive approach to restore function, as well as the leadership values that have brought the company to where it is now — and the unique ethical considerations of leading the way on brain-computer interface technology.

This issue also features device advice and design tips from medtech leaders at Intuitive Surgical, Zimmer Biomet, Boston Scientific, Johnson & Johnson MedTech’s Cerenovus and 3D-printed orthopedic device developer Restor3d.

We’ve also got a look back at the top medtech personnel moves of 2023, and a look forward with a schedule of the top device industry events of 2024 — including DeviceTalks Boston in May and October’s DeviceTalks West in Santa Clara, California.

At DeviceTalks West 2023, Intuitive President Dave Rosa offered this advice (read more from Rosa in our surgical robotics department): “Keep your head down and do the work. … Make sure you can get to a place where you can really impact the world. That’s a cultural thing.”

It’s good advice for all of us with an exciting 2024 ahead. As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Medical Design & Outsourcing — and thanks for reading.

– Jim Hammerand, Managing Editor
Medical Design & Outsourcing
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