Capitalizing on innovation
Greatbatch and Lake Region Medical each had histories of innovation dating back to the founding story of Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device OEM.Joseph Fleischhacker Sr. made fishing lures when he started Lake Region in the 1940s as a backyard side business outside Minneapolis; his connections with Medtronic co-founder Earl Bakken had him making all of Medtronic’s pacemaker leads by the 1960s, according to a 2014 article in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. Medtronic got into the implantable pacemaker business in the early ‘60s after Bakken’s brother-in-law and co-founder Palmer Hermundslie flew his own airplane to Buffalo to meet with electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch and Dr. William Chardack. Hermundslie negotiated Medtronic’s exclusive rights to produce and market the Chardack-Greatbatch implantable pulse generator; Greatbatch launched his own venture in 1970 to produce cutting-edge pacemaker batteries.
Fast-forward about 50 years, and the combined Integer has the capability to be a major partner with OEMs developing some of the newest and most exciting innovations in the medical device space.
Take transcatheter heart valves as an example. Analysts predict transcatheter aortic valve replacement technologies will be a $5 billion market by the 2020s, and medical device companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire transcatheter mitral valve replacement technology. For Integer, that’s an opportunity to unite Lake Region’s expertise in components and delivery guidewires with Greatbatch’s molding, catheter delivery system and steerable sheath capability.
“In effect, we now can basically develop and manufacture a full structural heart delivery system,” said COO Jeremy Friedman.
Another hot medical device area is neuromodulation – using pacemaker technology on the brain and nervous system to treat conditions ranging from Parkinson’s to back pain to obesity. Lake Region was focused on components and sub-assemblies such as headers, connectors, coils and cables; Greatbatch specialized in a different set of components and sub-assemblies, including batteries, enclosures, feedthroughs, shield assembly and leads – not to mention full systems.
“When we’re thinking about spinal cord stimulation or deep brain stimulation, again we can develop and manufacture the full system to the customer’s specifications, with required components and subassembly vertically integrated,” Friedman explained.
And, he added, Integer’s advanced surgical and orthopedics business can also play in another medical device field with a lot of buzz: robot-assisted surgery.