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Larry Haimovitch
to be pretty moderate, I don’t think you’re going to see a big change. Again, I think that people are
going to continue to demand better and better solutions to their problems.
BB&T: Does the coming of some form of healthcare reform automatically mean
fewer opportunities for med-tech companies?
Haimovitch: There are still many, many diseases and many parts of the body where we need
better solutions. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, and atrial fibrillation to name but a few.
There are some massive diseases that are especially daunting as the population ages. I think there
are still some huge market opportunities out there. So many major diseases are still not being
managed things as good as they could be.
BB&T: How should companies best organize themselves – particularly insofar as
development of new technologies is concerned – to deal with the new realities?
Haimovitch: One of the things that’s so clear to me after all the years of following this sector
is where does the innovation come from? Almost exclusively from the small, mostly private
companies. And why is that? Because they have tremendous focus, they’re just absolutely oneminded.
If big companies really want to succeed at being true innovative leaders, I think they’ve
got to look at organizing smaller teams. They’ve got to decentralize more, they’ve got to give more
autonomy and they’ve got to lose the attitude that ‘hi, I’m from headquarters and I’m here to help.’
They’ve got to form into more aggressive tightly knit units. I’m just amazed at how poorly the big
companies innovate compared to the small ones, it’s just remarkable.
I would have expected by now that big companies would have figured this out. That they would
have said that it’s obvious that we’re not very good at innovation, what’s the problem here? What
can we do to become better at it? Well, let’s organize ourselves in such a way that we have the
benefits of the big companies, we have the financial resources, but we don’t have the drawbacks
of the big company which is the bureaucratic, slow overly cautious attitude. That’s why there’s
so much acquisition activity in medical devices because the big companies realize they can’t, or
haven’t been successful innovating so if they want to stay up to the cutting edge of technologies
they’ve got to buy these companies.
BB&T: What promising trends are you seeing in the ophthalmology space, is there
one area of particular interest to you? I know we’ve talked about macular degeneration
in the past a good bit.
Haimovitch: Ophthalmology continues to be an extremely innovative part of the medical
technology landscape. Medical technology is exciting, but ophthalmology is the most exciting field
that I follow. Even though the eye is such a tiny part of the body, it’s remarkable how much progress
we’ve made, but yet it’s amazing how much more there needs to be done.
We’ve made tremendous progress in treating macular degeneration, with the availability of
Lucentis and Avastin, but there are other promising solutions on the horizon. The use of radiation
is very interesting in this space. NeoVista (Fremont, California) has been very successfully moving
through its clinical trial. They’re going to be finishing up their PMA trial very shortly. I like the
opportunity in macular degeneration, I think there are still huge opportunities in that space.
In refractive surgery, we’ve made a lot of progress with LASIK and other technologies [but] I
think the refractive field continues to be wide open.
Another interesting area is presbyopia, which is what the Visiogen acquisition was all about.
Everyone, if they live long enough will become presbyopic. Everyone, if they live long enough will
get a cataract. Presbyopia is still a huge area. We’ve made some real progress, but we haven’t really
developed the penultimate intraocular lens that completely mimics the natural one. There are some
things going on in the clinics that look promising, and Visiogen is the farthest along, with a PMA
158 MDD’s Book of Interviews: Peer Wisdom from 33 Med-Tech Luminaries