Cook Group Goes to School in Cell Therapy

Since drug-eluting stents burst onto the market last year with the launch of Johnson & Johnson 's Cypher stent, there's been increasing talk of device companies and convergence--that is, a new paradigm in which devices will combine with therapeutic agents in the body to achieve biological, not merely mechanical, effects. The stent success has naturally focused the spotlight on interventional cardiology companies, where Boston Scientific Corp. , Medtronic Inc. and Johnson & Johnson are pushing even deeper into the realms of device-enabled biological solutions to heart disease, with gene and cell therapies for coronary revascularization (see "Cardiac Gene Therapy: Combination Products' Next Frontier?" START-UP, September 2003 Also see "Cardiac Gene Therapy: Combination Products' Next Frontier?" - Scrip, 1 September, 2003.) and cardiac regeneration (see "Convergence and Complexity in Cardiac Regeneration," START-UP, April 2004Also see "Convergence and Complexity in Cardiac Regeneration" - Scrip, 1 April, 2004.).

Device companies see in the new linkage with biology an opportunity to expand both horizontally and vertically, by broadening disease...