Medical Device: Concept to Market

[Kelly_Bramble]

Interesting video - The video highlights aspects of the Investigational Device Exemption (or IDE) process, and provides general information on medical device clinical trials.

Medical Device: Concept to Market

[RWOLFEJR]

Very interesting indeed...

I've had an idea for quite a few years now that I really think has potential in the cancer treatment arena, but I lost a lot of steam on the idea when my dad died. Since then I never had the giddy-up to investigate how a person could go about getting the idea to fall on the right ears. Selfish and/or lazy... I know...

That video was very enlightening and basically a clear quick outline... One thing it left out was the idea of a patent and the time that can add to getting things done.

Any of you folks on this site do this sort of thing? I mean design medical equipment or the like and get it to market...

[MattD]

Late reply, but that is exactly my job.

[RWOLFEJR]

Hi Matt,
About twelve years ago around Pittsburgh PA they had a thing called something like... a cyber knife... and in Cleveland they had a newer unit called something like... a gamma knife? One utilized maybe 4 seperate tiny beams of radiation to fry tumors and the other had more like 30-ish beams. The better unit apparently had a few of those beams used just for monitoring any slight motion to keep the others on target. My recollection was that the beams were harmless until the point where they converged? Could be way off on this?

At that time it was only able to be used on brain tumors. Anywhere else and they would blast an entire area with the radiation and fry everything in the path. Those cyber knife gadgets were able to deliver with pinpoint accuracy. At that time my dad had lung cancer and then later developed a tumor in his brain. They were able to cook the brain tumor and reduce it from a grape to next to nothing and in doing so didn't hurt any of the surrounding gray matter. He was still all there in the head and no effect on any motor skills.

They screwd a jig to his head and attached him to a MRI or the like and got the exact location of the tumor... then moved him to that knife unit and attached that same jig and zapped the tumor.

So I thought... why not whip up a jig to screw down to your breastbone for anything needing cooked in the trunk area? figured that with the newer version of that sort of tool that had beams to track motion... they could possibly use that to more accurately attack cancers in other areas besides the head? Maybe this is already in place and a way of doing it now? But if not... Maybe you would like to consider looking into it?

I'm no surgeon or anything and maybe there are a million reasons why that wouldn't be feasible? But figured hey... might as well toss it out there just in case. If I'm unfortunate, and have to hoe that ugly cancer row instead of a nice quick smack with the proverbial truck... I don't want to have to scramble to fabricate a quick jig and try to convince any folks to give it a whirl on me...!!

Get busy with that would you... while I head out to the shop floor for another quick Camel...