Louis Cannon ’80 is a world-class cardiologist; he’s listed in Who’s Who in American Medicine; and he established one of the largest privately owned research centers in the country, the Cardiac and Vascular Research Center of Northern Michigan. However, his crowning achievement, BioStar Ventures, has created a new model of physician-hood: the doctor as not just practitioner, but also investor in the future of medicine.
Written By Patricia Grandjean
Wittenberg: BioStar gathers prominent physicians and researchers in cardiology and orthopedics who seek out, help develop and eventually sell new medical technologies to leading medical device companies worldwide. It’s the only initiative of its kind in the world. Was this on your mind when you were pre-med at Wittenberg?
Louis Cannon: My story is not a typical doctor story. I struggled in high school, and got accepted to Wittenberg—I thought—mainly to wrestle and play baseball. When I got there, I buckled down a little, started doing really well, and decided to go pre-med in my junior year. I wish I could tell you I always wanted to be a doctor because my dad was a doctor. But wrestling is really the force that guided my early life. I was actually the first in my family to go to college, and Wittenberg gave me a break.
Wittenberg: So, what caused the change?
LC: A lot has to do with my wife, Sally, who I met at Wittenberg. She was a much better student than I, and I used to go to the library to hang with her—where there’s nothing else to do but study.
Wittenberg: What attracted you to cardiology as a specialty?
LC: After I finished medical school, my goal quickly became to make a difference in people’s lives when it matters the most. For a time, I specialized in both emergency medicine and internal medicine. I thought emergency medicine was great, but if someone was having a heart attack, you still called a cardiologist who swept in and saved the person’s life—so that’s why I went into cardiology.
Wittenberg: Is there something in particular about the heart that fascinates you?
LC: It’s not only the heart seeming to be the basis of the soul, but it’s a complicated organ system that deals with plumbing and electricity and muscle power. And 50 percent of everyone in the United States is going to die of cardiovascular disease. So that’s where I felt I could make an impact. The other part of that is
that all of the males in my family have suffered from heart and
vascular disease at an early age.
Wittenberg:
You founded the Cardiac and Vascular Research Center of Northern Michigan in 1994. What was the goal for that?
LC: I wanted to bring research to the communities where most of medicine is practiced, rather than just centering it all in white- tower institutions. Much of the time major studies are done at the Cleveland Clinic or Mayo Clinic or major universities that have medical students and resident fellows, but 80 to 90 percent of actual medical practice lies outside those research institutes.
Wittenberg: What’s being practiced at the center?
LC: We currently do a lot of FDA-based research in collaboration with leading medical device companies, including Boston Scientific, Covidien-Medtronic, and Abbott Laboratories. We also do research protocols with high-powered institutions—our center is a member of Harvard Clinical Research Institute and Duke Clinical Research Institute. But we’re also a practicing community hospital, so I think our data becomes very important because it’s patient-centered.
Wittenberg: You’ve become renowned as an “interventional” cardiologist. What is your personal research focus in this area?
LC: One of the areas I’ve worked on recently is ultrasound: sound wave guided openings of arteries that are totally closed. I became the national principal investigator for a large study involving all the high-tower research centers. Then I actually went to the Montreal Heart Institute five years ago and performed a procedure live on medical TV, on a 14-year-old girl who had Kawasaki disease. She had total occlusion of almost all her coronary arteries. I utilized ultrasound to find the true opening in her arteries. I then put a wire through them and opened them up with a balloon and stent.
Wittenberg: You own a couple of patents in this field, don’t you?
LC: Yes, but no one is using the innovation anymore. The original patent was for the hemocannon—something that was used 15 to 20 years ago. The idea was that when a patient had a heart attack, you’d inflate a balloon in the affected artery, which blocked the blood flow. What the hemocannon allowed us to do was push blood through a catheter beyond the blockage, so we could save heart muscle. That patent was licensed to Boston Scientific; another patent was licensed to Medtronic.
Wittenberg: And these developments led to the foundation of BioStar Ventures?
LC: Right. After licensing these patents, I went on the advisory boards of some of these big medical device companies, and was able to see that there were certain areas where possible. We could start companies around these physician- sponsored innovations that we would then sell to the Boston Scientifics and Medtronics. And we could develop them swiftly, without getting caught in the bureaucratic machine—because these companies are really sales and distribution centers now, not centers of new technology. They’re Fortune 500. So in 2002, I started working with physicians around the country—now it’s around the world—with the goal of accelerating the development of new technologies that can improve the quality of healthcare. Right now, we deal only in cardiovascular research and orthopedics. I have medical partners I work with at Stanford, at Columbia, at Baylor University. I’ve got an orthopedics partner at the Cleveland Clinic—Alan Davis—who is the physician to the U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. When a new doctor comes up with an idea and takes it to one of these research centers, those places will say, “Hey, if you need early funding, BioStar can help—and they’ll bring together the domain expertise you’ll need to conduct research in that area.”
Wittenberg: What has the outcome been?
LC: We now manage more than a quarter-billion dollars in medical device assets. We’ve sold eight of 13 companies. One we just sold, to NuVasive Inc., is Ellipse Technologies. In this case, the inventor was able to develop a way to flux metal—nickel titanium rods—through a magnetic field and make the metal grow. What we can use it for is heart valves, as a medium to dilate the valve to grow with the heart. You can see where this would be very useful in pediatrics, not just in heart surgery but in cases where kids have traumatic orthopedic injuries, where they need repeated surgeries and may end up with one limb shorter than the other. Another recent company that was sold to Covidien-Medtronic is Cardiovascular Ingenuity, which developed a pharmacological compound—which you put on the balloon when doing balloon angioplasty—that prevents the regrowth of tissue and keeps blockages from coming back, typically a big problem.
Wittenberg: What are the nascent technologies that you’re most excited about right now?
LC: One we just invested in, along with major venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, is a company called TransMedics. Currently, when we do organ transplants throughout the world—whether you’re dealing with a heart, kidney or lungs—basically what happens is, we remove a donor kidney and pack it in an Igloo cooler, with dry ice. That limits the amount of time an organ can stay alive, which, in turn, limits the donors you can use. If a donor heart can only last four hours, you can’t match a donor in Hawaii with a dying heart patient in Michigan.
Wittenberg: Dr. Sanjay Gupta has done a segment on CNN about a device that helps extend the life of an organ before it’s donated.
LC: Transmedics has developed its own Organ Care System, a technology that allows an organ to continue functioning once it’s removed from the human body. In the case of the heart, it’s given a profusate that provides it with the electrolytes and sugars it needs to continue beating. This way, we can keep the heart— or the kidney, lung, maybe even the brain—working for hours and hours. We’re hoping for at least 12 hours, but we’re thinking even longer. It’s transformational. It’s not FDA-approved as yet in the U.S., but we’re doing studies in all the major centers.
Wittenberg: How do you balance your life? What do you do to decompress?
LC: I love to work out, to bike, to garden. I was a botany major at Wittenberg, and still love that, so I’m constantly planting annuals and perennials. My favorite flower is the foxglove—not only because that’s where we get digoxin, but because we have a lot of deer, and they know enough to know it’s a poison and can’t be eaten!
Wittenberg: Do you still harbor dreams of being a wrestling coach?
LC: You know, my elder son Ben ended up being a state wrestling champion in Michigan, and wrestled on the U.S. National Team. We had a wrestling room in our house from the day the kids were born to the day they left. So, you can say wrestling has always been a major part of our family.