The Orange County chapter of Tech Coast Angels recently formed a medical device and lifesciences division to engage in more medical device deals, with the goal of increasing its ranks of accredited investors with medical device expertise to facilitate such deals.
The first event that brought together potential investors to hear pitches from med-device startups was on Nov. 16 at The Cove.
The new division fills a void in the OC chapter, President Grant Van Cleve said at the event.
“There are more than 350 medical device companies in Orange County, which I understand to be the highest concentration in the nation,” he said. “There have been plenty of success stories. Meanwhile, TCA, the premiere angel group in OC, has done relatively few med-device deals. These companies either look to San Francisco or San Diego (for angel investments). We could be a platform for med-device investment, but we’re playing catchup. By recruiting investors from that space, we’ll improve our ability to study med-device deals, and once we start deploying capital, we should attract great deal flow, as well.”
Thomas Lee is chairman of the new division. The anesthesiologist joined the Tech Coast Angels chapter last year and has been the only active member with medical and clinical experience. He’s provided insight into potential medical and life sciences deals that it’s considered and said he believes “there was a general, universal feeling that the quality of the medical deals coming through could be both increased and improved.”
He said via email that, “With all the expertise, executives, medical device companies, and resources we have in Orange County, it would be a travesty not to effectively streamline a soup-to-nuts process of getting medical device inventions through to a successful outcome.”
DAART
One of the first med-device companies to pitch to those accredited investors at the Nov. 16 event was The Laser DARRT. The company was created and is based at Irvine incubator FastStart.studio, whose founder, Michael Sawitz, is its chief strategy officer.
DAART stands for “direct alignment radiation reduction technique.” The Laser DARRT the company’s named for is a device with a needle that founders say reduces radiation exposure time in surgeries that use radiation-based imaging to track a needle’s progress through the body.
The company, which launched two years ago, is seeking $450,000 to get its medical device approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The founders have been bootstrapping it and making deals to give those who’ve helped out either deferred payments or equity, Sawitz said. He put the company’s value at about $5.5 million.
The technology was created by Dr. Duane Baldwin, head of Endo-Urology at Loma Linda University Medical Center in San Bernardino County. The Laser DARRT recently obtained the intellectual property from the hospital, Sawitz said.
Radiation-based imaging, in typical surgeries requiring extensive imaging, such as kidney stone removal, is used to guide a surgical needle to the target area inside the body. The Laser DARRT reduces radiation, Sawitz said, because unlike the continual use of a traditional Fluoroscope to see the needle move through the body, it requires only short hits of fluoroscope radiation to make sure its needle is on track. Fluoroscopy is an imaging technique that uses X-rays to obtain real-time, moving images of the inside of a patient’s body.
Sawitz said The Laser DARRT can reduce radiation exposure time during surgery from 16 minutes to 10 seconds.
“It’s safer for the patient and safer for everyone in the operating room, and we believe it ultimately will save costs for the hospital, insurance companies and patients,” he said.
More than 3 million surgeries per year in the U.S. and over 10 million globally use “excessive” radiation, Sawitz said.
He estimated that it will take about nine months to bring the product to market.
Web Development Opp
A global education startup with an OC campus in the Eureka co-working building in Irvine is offering a web-development class starting on Nov. 28.
The class, offered by New York-based General Assembly, will teach software, including JavaScript and Rails.
“In today’s economy, web development skills are highly valued by employers, from startups to Fortune 500 companies,” said General Assembly Los Angeles Regional Director John Madigan, via email.
“We’re seeing those skills are in-demand outside of the traditional tech hotspot cities like San Francisco and New York.”
It’s a three-month, full-time web development immersion class that gives graduates a portfolio of work. Ninety-nine percent of General Assembly’s full-time students who participate in the schools’ career services programming get a job within six months, “which is pretty revolutionary,” Madigan said.
Career services programming is a full-time team dedicated to getting students jobs, partnerships, and collaborations at about 4,500 employers around the world.
