New initiatives aim to improve on Ireland's position as Europe's second biggest exporter of medical devices, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
MAKE NO BONES about it, Ireland’s medical technology sector has been doing well. We are the second biggest exporter of medical devices in Europe, after Germany, according to the Irish Medical Devices Association.
Many of the big global names have a presence here, but we also have plenty of home-grown talent. And initiatives – including one that kicks off today – are looking to increase that further.
“Ireland is host to a significant medical device cluster, which is described to be within the top four medical device clusters in the world,” says Dr Mark Bruzzi, a lecturer in mechanical and biomedical engineering at NUI Galway.
He is also director of BioInnovate Ireland, a new multi-disciplinary training programme to support innovation in the medical device sector.
“Ireland is recognised as a centre for the medical device industry, and we also have a clinical community who are striving to get more clinical trials into Ireland,” he explains.
“So we have seen the need to support innovation within the medical device sector so that the indigenous community can also look to innovating and starting new companies,” he explains.
And how does BioInnovate work? It’s based on a programme at Stanford, explains Bruzzi. At one level, it trains up teams with various backgrounds and places them into hospitals, so they can witness how things are currently done, then they brainstorm about new products that could make it to market and improve patient care.
And today, the first batch of eight “fellows”, split into two multi-disciplinary teams, start their year-long programme under the scheme, which has support from Enterprise Ireland and medical device companies Medtronic, Creganna-Tactx, Lake Region Medical and SteriPack.
With a focus this year on cardiology, the teams go in to get new perspectives from fresh eyes, says Dr Bruzzi.
“We are not looking for the consultants and interventionalists and clinicians to identify the problem, we are looking for them to expose the problems and for the teams to identify how things could be done better,” he says, adding that the programme puts the focus on the innovators.
“We are a training programme for supporting innovations within people, so that they can be innovative wherever they go, whether they go and do their own start-up, or to a multinational, or elsewhere.”
The programme will also teach the process of innovation in the medical device sector to PhD and master’s students in BioInnovate Ireland’s partner institutions NUIG, Dublin City University, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University College Cork and the University of Limerick, adds Bruzzi.
But what if you have a brainwave and you are not a BioInnovate fellow or a post-grad student? Then you could call the Centre for Innovation in Surgical Technology (CIST), which for the last two years has been hearing about ideas for medical devices, evaluating them and, where appropriate, working to bring them to market.
The first step is that call or e-mail from the inventor with the idea, explains Derek Young, who directs CIST at the Colles Institute in RCSI. “Everybody gets a hearing about what their idea is,” he says.
The team at CIST then considers the innovation, and if it gets a green light it moves on to the next phase.
“This is where we start engaging global groups externally on the marketing, technical and commercial side,” says Young, who describes how CIST is linked in with an extensive network of clinicians and companies around the world.
If the thumbs are still up, CIST goes back to the inventor and offers to work with them. They may look for funding from agencies such as Enterprise Ireland and work on developing prototypes and moving towards trials, in which case the inventor assigns the intellectual property over to CIST and gets an upfront payment.
Or the inventor can keep the IP and pay for a service from CIST to help them through the commercialisation process.
Already more than 200 innovative ideas crossed Young’s desk, a quarter of which have gone on through evaluation and validation.
They include a new device for spreading bones in orthopaedic surgery (the brainchild of a surgeon who saw a potentially better way of doing things) and a remote sensing device that allows doctors to monitor the health of patients when they leave hospital after a heart attack.
As well as progressing the ideas of inventors, CIST also acts as a consultant to companies looking to trial and put products on the market in Europe.
“We have grown dramatically in terms of providing services for multinationals and SMEs for their designs and trials, they come to us for advice,” says Young.
But it’s important to keep physically doing the rounds to alert people about the centre, he notes, describing how he visits hospitals around the country to spread the word.
“A lot of people sit on ideas, but none of this is rocket science if you have one place to come that has the networks, both physicians and commercial, and you know how to recognise what is commercial.”
You can contact Derek Young at derekyoung@rcsi.ie
