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TWST: What is Inovise Medical?
Mr. Wholihan: Inovise is a medical device company that is developing a
new low cost and non-invasive technology for diagnosing and monitoring
heart disease, with a particular focus on heart failure. The company was
founded in 1997 by several of the executives and senior engineers from
Hewlett-Packard's cardiology business based here in Oregon. This is a
$100 million business that HP sold to Agilent and then to Philips, and
this is now the core of Philips' cardiology business. Our team left at
that point and started Inovise. The company today has approximately 50
employees. It is a private company, and venture capital funded. We have
raised just under $50 million in total from a series of institutional
investors all across the world. We have Canadian, US, Taiwanese,
Singaporean and European investors. The global nature of our investor
base reflects the global nature of the opportunity in front of us. About
three or four years ago, the company really focused on the development
of the technology, which we are selling today. We call this technology
AUDICOR' and AUDICOR is a combination of an advanced analysis of the
electrocardiography (ECG) and the heart's sound in a single, easy to
take, non-invasive test. TWST: What are the priorities for Inovise over the next 12 months? What
would make that time frame a success?
Mr. Wholihan: In 2004 and early 2005, we focused on doing a number of
major clinical studies with institutions here in the US. We completed a
major study with the Cleveland Clinic, University of Cincinnati and two
other hospitals in Ohio. We completed a major study with the University
of California, San Francisco to establish the science and some of the
clinical proof around AUDICOR. We started selling and marketing the
product into our first market in 2005, with a focus on the emergency
department market, and we also introduced it into the pre-hospital or
EMS market in late 2005. But our focus for the last three to six months
is beginning to commercially introduce the product, to establish our
first customers, start support, and scale the usage of our technology in
those customer sites. Going forward, we are continuing to develop the
clinical proof for the technology. In particular, we are in the midst of
a major outcome study right now with a total of seven sites in the US,
one in Taiwan and one in Switzerland. This will be a 1,200-patient
outcome study that we expect to complete in Q3 of this year. So in a
nutshell, the two major focuses of the company right now are beginning
to sell the technology and the product into our first customer site and
to build upon the clinical proof and complete this outcome study that we
have launched in Q4 2005.
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