The Risks of Surgical Over-Reaching

Executive Summary

The announcement this month that HeartPort Inc. will be acquired by Ethicon Inc., a Johnson & Johnson operating company, turns a kind of final page on what was, to anyone living through the crazy world of medical device start-ups over the past several years, one of the industry's most interesting stories. In the end, what has become clear, is that HeartPort simply made the wrong bet. The cardiac surgery revolution, if you can call it that, has been a shift from CPB to off-pump procedures; about minimally invasive techniques per se, surgeons are still very ambivalent.