Very interesting and potentially very positive news today. JNJ's Cordis division has just acquired a guidewire filter technology (apparently with similar applications as Omnifilter) from a company called Angioguard. Unfortunately, I cannot find the purchase price. This would be an interesting number to know, as it would really help value the Omnifilter technology.
It appears that the Angioguard product is a proprietary but un-patented technology, at least my patent searches have not found it -- if anyone out there can find it, please post. The angioguard product is apparently already on the market in Europe (but not for carotid applications), but they are still talking about initiating tests in the U.S. market. The company had projected U.S. 510k approval earlier this year, but that has apparently not yet occurred. I wonder if they filed the 510k notification and were told by the FDA that trials would be needed before approval?
In any case, if Cordis in fact did fork out substantial cash for this product, then they must see the market potential. In that case, other companies will have to race to come up with their own competing product, and that is ALL GOOD for ABMI, ITI, and the Omnifilter. First-to-market may belong to JNJ now (too bad they didn't buy ABMI instead), but this seems to me like a tremendous validation of the value of the Omnifilter technology in the intravascular market. There are a handful of major players here, all of whom want to be number one, so it seems like they will ALL need to have a guidewire filter technology if JNJ is going to.
More digging to be done on this one. Now that a public company has the Angioguard product, there should be some publicly available info out there soon. Stuart Bockler, it's time to capitalize on this very visible news about guidewire filter technology: get out there and blow that ABMI horn a bit now..... |
