Dr. Kurt Amplatz is back in his office at AGA Medical Corporation in Golden Valley, the company he founded. Better, he’s back in his workshop. He was banned from the premises for almost two years.
Amplatz, 82, is the inventor of revolutionary medical devices, including one that has spared more than 100,000 children and adults from the trauma of open-heart surgery. He started AGA Medical in 1995 to manufacture his inventions.
During the search for investors and settlement of the lawsuit, letters and affidavits poured in from doctors around the world, all saying essentially the same thing: The Septal Occluder is a miracle, and Amplatz is a savior.
It was a successful business, already valued at $25 million in 1999 based on healthy overseas sales of AGA’s occluders, devices used to seal up holes in patients’ hearts. But a dispute emerged between two partners to whom Amplatz had sold his shares in the privately held firm. By October 2002, it turned to litigation. A year later, with AGA being run by a court-appointed receiver, Hennepin County District Judge Patricia Karasov ordered Amplatz out. Though the fast-growing company continued to prosper in receivership (and expects revenues of more than $100 million this year), the ejection of Amplatz was tantamount to cutting off its source of new products.
