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Medical marvels
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Northeast Wisconsin can become a hotbed for medical device development
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By Nikki Kallio, March, 2010
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Left to right: Larry Panzer, Daniel Laundrie, James Kregel of Surgical Site Solutions
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Sometimes all you need to get started on a great business venture is a napkin, a pen and a good idea. And maybe an economic crystal ball. Kurt Waldhuetter of the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Network (WEN) in Green Bay has seen that glimpse of the future and says the Northeast Wisconsin region has all of the right components for developing medical devices and technology.
“Medical devices represent a growth industry,” Waldhuetter says. “You have an aging population, and there’s more and more need for devices to allow people to live in their homes. There’s a need for improving devices in a clinical setting, to make it safer for patients. This is an area where I’m sort of putting a stake in the ground and saying, ‘We can do this in Northeast Wisconsin.’”
It’s already happening. For example, WEN, which helps entrepreneurs connect with the right people and businesses and to find grants to support their projects, has already been working with Aurora BayCare to help get some medical device startups off the ground. In July 2008, Annette Paul was brought into Aurora as its director of clinical research to help expand clinical trials and help physicians develop their ideas for improving medical procedures and tools.
“I think there are a lot of people with ideas, and they may not even be physicians,” Paul says. A home-care giver, for example, might have an idea for improving the way in-home patient care is provided, she says.
“That’s what we want to encourage,” Waldhuetter says. “To have scientists, physicians, researchers, entrepreneurs, or clinicians of any sort to be able to recognize, ‘Hey I have an idea, what do I do next with it?’”
Dan Laundrie of Green Bay is one of those folks. While working as a nurse at St. Vincent Hospital in Green Bay, Laundrie and his colleague, Brian Coleman, a traveling technician from Dallas, talked one night about an idea for a new surgical prep device that vacuums body hair as patients are shaved.
“He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you could just vacuum the hair,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’d thought of it a lot, but how do you do it?’” Laundrie says.
That night Laundrie woke up and drew on a napkin some possible prototypes for a clipper with a vacuum tip on it.
That was in January 2008, and since then the product has developed through a few versions. Laundrie first attempted to use a wall suction unit at the hospital but it didn’t have enough power, so he gave the device its own attached vacuum, testing it out on hairy friends (using free beer as incentive). Now the device, called a Clip Vac, is made up of a disposable plastic piece that snaps onto a special vacuum. Laundrie and his partners formed Surgical Site Solutions and have worked with WEN and some area companies, including Modern Design and Development in Green Bay, on the product. They’re hoping to raise $1.3 million from investors, and Laundrie says they expect sales to exceed $30 million in five years, based on prospective demand among the nation’s hospitals.
One of the prototypes has already proved extremely popular at an AORN (Association of periOperative Registered Nurses) convention last year, he says.
“It almost seemed too easy,” Laundrie says. “Even as we’ve been going along, people have been saying, ‘I can’t believe this hasn’t been invented already.’”
But the process of developing the Clip Vac has been more involved than Laundrie expected, including some trial and error with out-of-state companies. Getting in touch with the right people who understood different aspects of getting a product off the ground was key.
“The connection portion is huge,” Laundrie says. “You’d be surprised – you may think a person can’t help you, but they usually know someone who can.”
In another case, Dr. Janette Strasburger, a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin Fox Valley in Neenah and professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, worked with WEN to secure a $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health through its small business research programs. She and UW-Madison professor Ronald Wakai want to put special fetal heart monitoring equipment onto a truck so they can bring the unit to pregnant mothers instead of having pregnant mothers come from all over the country to Madison where the equipment is currently located.
They’re working with Shared Medical Technology in Rice Lake, and possibly others, to develop the truck base. Another company will construct walls for the truck’s magnetically shielded room that houses the superconducting quantum interference device, or SQUID.
“One of the things Northeast Wisconsin has to offer are a lot of young entrepreneurs,” Strasburger says. “I believe these young entrepreneurs have a lot of potential for developing medical technology, especially medical software.”
These might include new education modules or technology for care of the elderly, fetuses and newborns, areas of medicine which Strasburger says have plenty of room for development.
It can all be done right here, Waldhuetter insists, because Northeast Wisconsin’s many smaller manufacturers have the capacity and ability to build new medical devices, or the equipment needed to build them.
“We can build almost anything,” he says. “We can build a 747 jet here if we want to. I haven’t seen any limits.”
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