Campus venture gets €3.75m for heart valve

GALWAY’S “MEDICAL device valley” has proven to be a magnet for a €3.75 million venture which aims to develop a new valve device for cardiac surgery.

Clinical and bio-engineering experts from Georgia Institute of Technology and Stanford University medical centre will work with Apica Cardiovascular, which hopes to hire up to six people initially at its campus company base at NUI Galway (NUIG).

The start-up company is headed by James L Greene, from New Jersey, USA, who has more than 20 years’ experience in the medical device industry after a period spent in the US military.

He was first attracted to Galway when he was developing sales and marketing for medical device company Medtronic AVE in the city back in 1997.

“It just had that Silicon Valley feel to it – lots of expertise here, without walking very far,” he told The Irish Times, speaking at the NUIG innovation centre earlier this week.

The project is being backed financially by Seroba Kernel Life Sciences, based in Dublin, London and Cambridge, England, and Triventures, a medical technology specialist venture capital company based in Israel.

Greene hopes to develop a “transapical access and closure system” which can simplify techniques in cardiovascular surgery to open and close the apex of a beating heart. Early prototypes of the system to minimise bleeding and damage to tissue were developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Emory University in Atlanta.

Seed funding was provided by the Coulter Foundation research programme and the Georgia research alliance “venture lab” programme.

The new company will benefit from the “synergies associated with NUIG’s innovation centre”, Greene says. He also paid tribute to Enterprise Ireland for its support.

He believes Galway is “rapidly becoming a major medical device hub of innovation on the global stage”, and “perhaps the only cluster of its type” in Europe. “It’s similar to what you have already in Minnesota and Minneapolis,” he said.

“Obviously, we were attracted by certain research and development tax advantages which Ireland offers, but in the end the people are very important to the development of a project like this,” he said.

Dr Daniel O’Mahony, Seroba Kernel Life Sciences partner, will join the board of Apica.

“The Apica technology has the potential to revolutionise the delivery of different types of medical devices to the heart, including aortic and mitral valves,” Dr O’Mahony said.

The new company would make the most of the much-praised “med tech DNA” now existing in Ireland, he said.