St. Jude Medical plans to combine its implantable electronic device unit with its cardiovascular/ablation unit into one integrated R&D organization, and announced several senior leadership changes as part of the restructuring.

Hoping to succeed in the elusive field of atrial fibrillation, Endosense is taking an anti-start-up strategy: focusing more on later-stage commercialization and market launch and less on technology vetting.

The device industry was robust in 2005. Share prices remain strong for the most part--some orthopedics and cardiovascular companies struggled, but for the most part device stock indices continue strong--and the IPO window for start-ups remains open. New technology is flowing and so are venture dollars. Certainly, the device industry has had few instances of the kinds of bad news that Big Pharma and biotechs have struggled with: investor frustration, high-profile pipeline problems, and general industry struggles to find a viable long-term strategy, with a couple of exceptions. The battle for Guidant was widely-reported precisely because Guidant ran into problems with its ICD line, which caused Johnson & Johnson to hesitate and opened the door for a rival bid from Boston Scientific. Similarly, conflict of interest stories were featured in several general business publications, all with a decidedly negative spin. We don't share the view that conflict of interest is a real problem-just the opposite: physician involvement in device development is the lifeblood of the industry.

The founders of Symphony Medical asked themselves how they could improve outcomes in atrial fibrillation patients with a procedure that would be faster than current ablative techniques and which wouldn't destroy heart tissue. The solution lies in a biopolymer that can achieve a biological effect on the heart, and it came, in a roundabout way, from cell therapy work begun in heart failure.