Life under a new corporate owner has been good for what’s soon to be known as Medtronic Neurovascular in Irvine, its top official says.
Medtronic PLC, when it was known as Medtronic Inc., acquired a unit that treats nervous system blood vessel diseases as part of Medtronic’s $42.9 billion buy of Covidien PLC. The deal closed in January.
Medtronic has a tax-friendly headquarters in Ireland and operates from suburban Minneapolis.
The new unit, which employs about 650, includes manufacturing and research and development. It has a clean room and a facility for designing devices used to treat conditions such as hemorrhagic and ischemic strokes.
Among the Irvine unit’s output are embolic coils and liquid embolics for treating aneurysms and arteriovenous malformations; the Pipeline embolic device, which restores natural blood flow past wide-neck brain aneurysms; and Solitaire, which combines the ability to immediately restore blood flow and retrieve blood clots from acute ischemic stroke victims.
Medtronic’s ownership, although new, has “actually been quite good for us,” said Brett Wall, president of the neurovascular unit, during an interview at the unit’s Toledo Way offices. “Medtronic as a company has a history of [premarket approval] devices, the types of things we’ve been doing here.”
Wall mentioned that the deal “lined up very well” with recent publications of stroke data in the New England Journal of Medicine that referred to Solitaire and other products, as well as the American Heart Association changing stroke treatment guidelines to include stent retrieving devices, which the unit produces locally.
“We continue to invest in Irvine,” said Earl Slee, the neurovascular unit’s vice president of technology, strategy and business development.
He said the device maker has hired more engineers and technicians for the operation’s R&D unit, which opened in 2012.
“We had the first [premarket approval] in Medtronic after the close,” Slee said. He was referring to the Food and Drug Administration’s clearing of a next-generation version of Pipeline.
Solitaire, another Irvine-developed product, took the spotlight during the National Stroke Conference in Nashville, Tenn., another event that happened after Medtronic closed the deal.
“Right after close, at the International Stroke Conference in Nashville this year, that’s where we had the majority of our clinical data presented on our mechanical thrombectomy device called Solitaire that literally is changing the standard of care for how you treat patients with acute ischemic stroke,” Slee said.
Ischemic strokes occur when a blood clot blocks an artery leading to the brain. They are traditionally treated with drugs.
“Ischemic stroke is an enormous problem … it’s the No. 5 cause of death in the United States but the No. 1 cause of disability,” Wall said.
Clinical data showed that usage of Solitaire on people with ischemic stroke was twice as likely to return them to functional independence, he said.
Wall said Solitaire also can help cut costs in the healthcare system because it allows patients to return to work and makes them less dependent on services such as home health.
“Making great, innovative new devices was important then and remains important now,” Wall said. “But I think what’s changed in our environment today is if you don’t provide things to the healthcare system that add value, they don’t have a lot of time for you.”
He said he believes Solitaire will be a “win” for payers, such as insurance companies.
“The nice thing about Medtronic is that’s the way they think—that’s in their DNA,” Slee added.
Other Operations
The neurovascular unit isn’t the only Medtronic operation in OC. The company has more than 1,300 workers in all. Its local operations also include a heart valve “center of excellence” in Santa Ana where it develops and makes replacement heart valves that compete with Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp.’s devices.
Medtronic’s valve group includes Medtronic CoreValve, which it got in 2009 in a $700 million acquisition of Irvine-based CoreValve LLC.
Medtronic has annual companywide sales of more than $20.3 billion, 92,500 workers, and a recent market value of $109 billion.
Vascular devices accounted for $132 million of sales in the three months ended April 24.
