DTW Podcast: Zimmer Biomet slims, Corza Medical grows in pursuit of grabbing market share

In this week’s DeviceTalks Weekly Podcast, Rich Newitter, managing director at SVB Leerink, says Zimmer Biomet’s decision to spin out its spinal and dental business will accelerate its already impressive market share grab in its core orthopedics industry.

Dewitter says CEO Bryan Hanson brings a tried-and-true diversification model used by companies like his former employer, Covidien. The spinout of the spinal and dental businesses into a NewCo will allows the company to focus more resources on selling knee and hip implants as well as building out an impressive robotics franchise and a potentially sector-leading line of digital tools and sensors.

“Zimmer has effectively gone from a share loser for almost a decade leading up to when Bryan Hanson took over to a share-taking position,” he said in an interview with Chris Newmarker, executive editor of life sciences. “This most recent quarter, their share gains have widened quite dramatically.”

In …

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South Africa pauses rollout of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine

South Africa has scrapped its plans to vaccinate a portion of its population with the COVID-19 vaccine from Oxford University and AstraZeneca (LON:AZN) after a small study showed it was ineffective against a variant widely circulating there.

In the interim, South Africa will rely on vaccines from Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE).

Researchers at Oxford University and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa found the AstraZeneca vaccine to offer little to no protection against mild-to-moderate disease. The research has not been peer-reviewed.

Get the full story from our sister site, Drug Discovery & Development.

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Johnson & Johnson applies for vaccine approval from FDA

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) announced that it submitted an FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) application for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

New Brunswick, N.J.-based J&J’s Janssen Biotech subsidiary submitted the application for its investigational single-dose Janssen COVID-19 vaccine candidate, based on safety and efficacy data from its Phase 3 Ensemble clinical trial that met all of its primary and key secondary endpoints, according to a news release.

Get the full story at our sister site, Drug Discovery & Development.

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Johnson & Johnson applies for vaccine approval from FDA

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) announced that it submitted an FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) application for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

New Brunswick, N.J.-based J&J’s Janssen Biotech subsidiary submitted the application for its investigational single-dose Janssen COVID-19 vaccine candidate, based on safety and efficacy data from its Phase 3 Ensemble clinical trial that met all of its primary and key secondary endpoints, according to a news release.

The company expects to have product available to ship immediately following FDA authorization, as well. Johnson & Johnson set its target to produce 1 billion doses in 2021 and expand production after that. The company has committed to not-for-profit pricing during the pandemic assuming its single-dose vaccine is authorized by FDA and other regulators. J&J is also investigating a two-dose regimen for its vaccine.

READ: Which companies will likely produce the most COVID-19 vaccine i…
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Which companies will likely produce the most COVID-19 vaccine in 2021? 

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Since the beginning of the pandemic, much of society has pinned its hopes on the availability of a vaccine. Now that several are available across the world, there is hope, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, in a recent JAMA interview. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel.” 

One thing that will make the light at the end of the tunnel brighter as we head into the spring is the greater availability of vaccine doses. “The discordance between supply and demand will be diminished,” Fauci said. 

The roster of companies producing vaccines is steadily increasing, making it possible to vaccinate a substantial portion of the world’s population this year. (Note: Most of the companies in this list have two-dose vaccines.) 

Here’s a roundup of notable companies’ production targets for 2021:

AstraZeneca and Oxford University: Up to 3…
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Russia reports 91.6% efficacy for its Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine

Sputnik V in vials. Image from Mos.ru via Wikipedia.

The Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine could be more efficacious than those from AstraZeneca (LON:AZN) or Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) based on interim trial results.

The two-dose Sputnik vaccine was 91.6% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and 100% effective at preventing severe and moderate disease in a study involving 19,866 participants.

The data were published in The Lancet. No data, however, was available on the impact of SARS-CoV-2 variants on the vaccine’s efficacy.

By comparison, the single-dose JNJ vaccine was 57% to 72% effective at preventing moderate to severe disease, depending on the geography. The vaccine was least effective in South Africa, where 95% of infections were the result of a more-infectious variant circulating there.

AstraZeneca’s (LON:AZN) two-dose vaccine was between 62% and 90% effective, depen…

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DTW Podcast: CEO Johnson on entrepreneurship, upcoming MedtechColor Pitch Contest; Krum handicaps medtech Q4

In this episode of the DeviceTalks Weekly Podcast, Angelique Johnson, CEO of MEMstim, shares her “accidental entrepreneur” story and how it has enabled her the help others pursuing the same dream. Also, Johnson, co-founder of MedtechColor, an organization seeking to further the advancement of people of color in the medical device industry, details the group’s goals and invites entrepreneurs of color to apply for the group’s Pitch Contest.

The deadline is Feb. 5. Go to medtechcolor.org for more information.

Truist Securities Managing Director Kaila Krum answers questions about medtech’s Q4 performance, diving deeper on Stryker and other companies.

Krum also shares details on a survey conducted by the research team that sought to answer the question – when will hospitals start seeing elective patients again.

Pharma Editor Brian Buntz returns to tell his story of his 10-days wearing a continuous glucose monitor from Dexcom. Buntz wrote about the exp…

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Corza Medical set to take on “almost monopolistic” surgical giants

Corza Medical, a new venture backed by the financial firepower of private equity giant GTCR, is looking to build a surgical tool supplier that its executive chairman Greg Lucier says can compete with “almost monopolistic” leaders in the space.

To mount the challenge, Corza acquired Surgical Specialties Corp., a supplier of surgical sutures and ophthalmic knives. Corza will use this beachhead in Westwood, Mass., to build a pipeline of acquired assets including TachoSil, a surgical patch product line Corza acquired from Takeda Pharmaceuticals last year.

In an interview with the DeviceTalks Weekly podcast, Lucier, the former CEO of spinal company NuVasive (NSDQ:NUVA) and diagnostic company Life Technologies, said management believes “there is an opening for a pretty good-sized surgical tools and technologies company to compete against the Ethicons and the Medtronics of the world.”

Lucier said the two Goliaths have reached a size that makes them “almost mono…

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MedTech 100 roundup: January ends with a dip

After spending several weeks on the ascent, medtech stocks leveled out a bit to end January, ending a run of several new highs in 2021.

MassDevice‘s MedTech 100 index ended the week (Jan. 29) at 104.05 points, marking a -2.2% drop from the 106.4-point mark set at the end of the previous week (Jan. 22).

The index had previously reached 107.4 points on Jan. 20, topping the all-time best of 106.81 points set on Jan. 8. That mark represents a 16% jump from the pre-pandemic high of 92.32 set on Feb. 19, 2020, and a 72.9% overall leap from the lowest point of 62.13 set on March 23, 2020.

However, the drop from that high point to medtech’s current position is approximately -3.1%, although the industry still remains well above its pre-pandemic high (12.7%) and its mid-pandemic low point (67.5%).

Here are some of the best-performing medtech stocks from 2020.

While medtech saw a slight decline from the previous week, both of the overall markets fared …

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Corza Medical set to take on “almost monopolistic” surgical giants

Corza Medical, a new venture backed by the financial firepower of private equity giant GTCR, is looking to build a surgical tools supplier that its Executive Chairman Greg Lucier says can compete with “almost monopolistic” leaders in the space.

To mount the challenge, Corza acquired Surgical Specialties Corp., a supplier of surgical sutures and ophthalmic knives. Corza will use this beachhead in Westwood, Mass. to build a pipeline of acquired assets including TachoSil, a surgical patch product line Corza had acquired from Takeda Pharmaceuticals last year.

In an interview with the DeviceTalks Weekly podcast, Lucier, the former CEO of spinal company Nuvasive and diagnostic leader Life Technologies, says management believes “there is an opening for a pretty good-sized surgical tools and technologies company to compete against the Ethicons and the Medtronics of the world.”

Lucier said the two Goliaths have reached a size that makes them “almost monopolistic …

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4 ways COVID-19 variants could impact the battle against the pandemic

SARS-CoV-2 electron microscope image from Wikipedia

Highly-transmissible COVID-19 variants have likely been circulating undetected for months in places like the U.K., South Africa and Brazil. They then seemed to burst onto the scene, fueling large outbreaks that dwarfed preceding ones. 

While the variants aren’t well understood, they suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is mutating in ways that confer an evolutionary advantage. They thus threaten to become dominant throughout much of the world in coming months unless protocols such as growing vaccination, mask-wearing and social distancing can slow their spread.

The new variants are also likely to change the fight against COVID-19 in crucial ways. Here are four facts to consider:

1. New variants could delay herd immunity and make vaccinating children more important

After FDA authorized mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna in late 2020, it seemed t…

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The top 5 MassDevice stories of the week — January 29, 2021

Two important medtech industry hires are among the top stories on MassDevice this week, with robotic surgery and COVID-19 vaccines also dominating the news.

Want to hear more about the week’s top medtech news on MassDevice? Executive editor Chris Newmarker and Tom Salemi will discuss the week’s “Newmarker’s Newsmakers” — as well as play some drum and bugle corps music — during our DeviceTalks Weekly podcast.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s MassDevice Top Five:

5. Titan Medical closes on $11.5M offering

Titan Medical (TSX:TMD; NSDQ:TMDI) closed on a previously announced offering, raising $11.5 million in aggregate gross proceeds. The Toronto-based surgical robotics company conducted the sale by way of a short form prospectus in each of the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario — as well as a private placement in the U.S. Read the full story. 

4. Butterfly Network names new CEO before going public via merger

Dr. Todd Fruchterman…

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