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Several area firms are benefitting from a surge in demand for minimally invasive surgical procedures targeted toward women’s health. Procedures that can be done in a doctor’s office, rather than a hospital, provide cost savings, convenience and faster recovery times from patients. And analysts say medical devices geared toward women’s health procedures is an area of substantial unmet medical need.
For instance, Hologic Inc., the Bedford-based women’s health-care company, won approval this month from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to sell its Adiana permanent contraception system. Company officials say the system is designed to provide women a less invasive alternative to tubal ligation. The procedure does not involve an incision and can be performed in a doctor’s office using local anesthesia.
There are 700,000 tubal ligation surgeries performed in the U.S. per year, according to Hologic. If just a fraction of those women chose the Adiana procedure, which costs between $1,300 and $1,500, the potential revenue stream for Hologic would be tremendous.
Tony Kingsley, senior vice president at Hologic said, “We are looking at a market of at least $1 billion for the product.” Hologic has one competitor, Mountain View, Calif.-based Conceptus Inc., which has a similar product already on the market called Essure.
Mira Sahney, director of gynecology at London-based Smith & Nephew PLC, whose Endoscopy division is headquartered in Andover, said one key to the success of minimally-invasive procedures for women’s health is doctor education. “Not all doctors are taught these procedures in medical school,” Sahney said the goal of current best practices is to target procedures to the specific medical problem, while sparing healthy organs and tissues.
Smith & Nephew markets a product called the Operative Hysteroscopy System, which is an endoscopic procedure, using a camera and a small blade to remove uterine fibroid and endometrial polyps in a doctor’s office.
The rise of physician’s office-based surgeries is also fueling a growing market for the disposable tools that go along with the medical devices.
“The women’s health market is growing in leaps and bounds,” said Matthew Traub, vice president of marketing and sales for OBP Medical in Lawrence. Traub, along with two co-founders, launched the company in early 2009 with several products for office-based procedures.
“Typically these instruments were geared toward hospitals — they were made of stainless steel and were reusable,” Traub said. He said doctors need a cheaper, more convenient disposable alternative that doesn’t present a small physician’s practice with the challenge of sterilizing all those instruments now.
Traub said the company has customers at the ready and secured a deal to market some products through a large unnamed medical device company. That company currently does not have any disposable office-based products and is looking to capitalize on the growth of the minimally-invasive market, Traub said.
OBP will also directly distribute some of the products. The company has been entirely bootstrapped and has raised $350,000 so far.
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