Yet another edition of the SEMDA Medtech Conference has come and gone. The 2019 edition saw colleagues from 26 states attend and significant diversity among the PitchRounds companies who hailed from AL, AR, GA, FL, KY, MS, NC, SC, TN, TX and VA.
Every year, SEMDA is the place to connect with the entirety of the southeastern medtech ecosystem. As always, we loved catching up with colleagues, current customers, prospective customers and investors. We are also thankful to the SEMDA staff that put hundreds of hours into the event and program. Here are a handful of our favorite quotes and insights from the program.
“Turning a project into a product is complex. Most successful inventors and companies are collaborators. What’s required is leadership within organizations developing products, within states that enable funding and incentivize the common good, the common goal.” – Andrew Stevenson, MacroHelix.
“[This is] the right place, the right time, the right idea and the right resources.” – Bob Crutchfield, BrightEdge Ventures, on the prospects for a centrally located bioscience innovation district in Atlanta.
“What’s [your] value proposition, not just to the patient or the provider, but more broadly [considering] all the stakeholders that touch the product?” – Ashley Wittorf, AdvaMed Accel
“The clinical data requirements for FDA may not be the same for CMS or the value analysis committee at Emory or a large healthcare system on the west coast.” – Tiffany Wilson, GCMI
“The series As are gone. It’s now up to the angels to invest the first $5 to $10 million [in a young medtech company.] – David Adair, Solas BioVentures
“Don’t be overly sensitive about dilution. If you can get capital – cash – get capital because it’s difficult to predict when things are going to go south. If you take debt, make sure it’s assigned to achieving a certain milestone.” – Todd Creech, HealthQuest Capital
“If you aren’t a medtech investor, make sure you have medtech experts around you. Maybe you’re investing as an angel in a therapeutic area or device that’s near and dear to your heart because a family member was impacted. Make sure you have people in this network who you can go to for guidance to keep folks on track. Building prototypes is super fun. Following the rules is boring. But that’s the process. Otherwise you wind up in ‘neverland’ [with a shelf full of prototypes, not what you need to get through the FDA and into the healthcare system.”] – Tiffany Wilson, GCMI
GCMI is committed to successfully accelerating medtech innovation in a capital efficient way. We are the test site and launch pad for medtech innovation that saves lives and improves patient care. GCMI helps customers accelerate the development of medical technologies to reach patients sooner. Our customers include faculty, researchers, inventors, engineers and product managers. We also serve industry partners like pharma and medical device companies, as well as large health systems with physician networks. Our facilities, tools, and team serve as a one stop shop for medical technology innovation at any point in a product’s pathway to government approval and patient care.
To learn more about who we are, what we do and how we do it, contact info@devices.net or info@t3labs.org.