Myocor is ready to take the next step. The 10-year-old Maple Grove company’s cornerstone product is its Coapsys device, which treats regurgitation, or improper closure and leaking, of the heart’s mitral valve. According to the Mayo Clinic, as many as one in five people over age 55 have some kind of mitral valve regurgitation, which can leave sufferers fatigued and short of breath.
Coapsys is currently undergoing U.S. clinical trials. To move from being a clinical evaluation-stage company to being a commercial operation, Myocor needed new leadership. In December, it tapped James Hickey, Jr., as its new president and CEO, a manager whose proven skills have guided three local medical-device companies to better times.
After 15 years with Chicago-based medical-products company Baxter International, Hickey joined Aequitron Medical, a maker of infant monitors and ventilators, in 1993. Three years later, after beefing up the Plymouth company’s sales and management, Hickey oversaw its purchase by a division of Tyco Healthcare. The next year, as CEO of Angeion Corporation, Hickey moved that troubled Brooklyn Park company out of the crowded implantable-defibrillator business, shifting it to the more promising market of pulmonary and cardiorespiratory-testing equipment. Angeion turned a profit this year. Then, in 2002, Hickey took charge of Pulmonetic Systems, where he’d been a board member. He built up the Plymouth company’s portable ventilator business, and last year, Pulmonetic Systems was acquired by Pennsylvania-based Viasys Healthcare.
So what made Hickey want to be a CEO again? “First of all, I really think a lot of [Myocor’s] technology. It is very effective,” he says. Hickey also liked that Myocor had a second product in development. “So not only do you have one product introduced, but you already know what the next one is, which I think gives a company that much more momentum,” he adds.
Hickey expects that Coapsys, which repairs stretched valves using a kind of button-and-string device, will receive FDA approval in 2007. Myocor is also developing a less invasive version of its valve-repair device that can be implanted via a catheter through a small incision.
Hickey plans to “make sure we continue to build momentum in our clinical trials—i.e., continue to enroll patients at the rate that we need.” He and Myocor also are gearing up for commercialization of both products once they receive the FDA’s blessing. Since its inception, Myocor has pulled in $50 million in venture investment. It may not be long before those investors cash in.
