The Polish company wants to treat heart disease and cheaper
- Small companies in the MedTech sector engage in innovation at their own risk
- Market giants buy back and implement solutions
- Poland is too small a market to commercialize medical products
– Poland is not associated with innovations in the course of the disease, but Medinice was created by Polish doctors who had many ideas for new methods of treatment in the field of cardiology. When one of the founders of Medinice had his idea stolen by an official company, we decided it was time to get our intellectual property and help the doctors bring their ideas to life. The first – of those currently happening – is MiniMax, the world’s first electrode device with 3D mapping, performing minimally invasive cardiac ablation procedures. It allows you to perform in pregnant women and children, but most importantly, even in operating theaters with equipment, so you can treat patients in poorer countries. The second project for CoolCryo, i.e. a system for cryoablation of the heart with the use of dispensing nitrogen. Ablation is the burning or freezing of the damaged heart frequency of the effective arrhythmia.
– Of course, the company exists to make money, but we also just want to help patients. The projects are innovative, because thanks to this, the treatments are not only effective and safe, but also much cheaper to treat. Scientific research is of course very additional. In Polish conditions, it costs a minimum of PLN 10 million to reach the stage specified on the market, while in the world we are talking about tens of millions of dollars. We financed our activities from auxiliary funds, and then we used the help of educational funds, and then we supported financing from the issue of shares. Medinice SA on the capital market is delivered in 2018, when we joined the companies listed on NewConnect, two years later we entered the main floor of the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
– Poland, as I mentioned before, is an ideal place to develop a product, but in the meantime it is too small a market to make it profitable to commercialize a medical product here. The number of damages here is not equal to the damage to the expenses incurred. All companies in our industry naturally think about the whole of Europe, the USA and Asia. For a year now, new registrations have been required in the EU, which enable obtaining the required certificate, which is why the American market is getting even higher, and also for us – we are discussing whether some applications cannot be checked from it. Which, on the one hand, changed our assumption, and on the other hand, was subject to liability that only smaller companies were given.
– foundation in our industry employees are very involved in each company. Try to motivate them with decent salaries and incentive programs – based on how we are the only company in this industry in Poland that we give them to each employee. Our projects are also very developmental, so a lot can happen to employees, especially since we employ specialists working all over the world. Small companies today create global solutions, giants do not really have the support of research and development departments, they carefully watch a small entity that helps to bear the risk of research on the implementation of solutions. Then they get ideas or they buy whole companies, and then new solutions – companies like Medinice are too small to do anything else. You’re not going to compete with them – to start with, it’s important to make our solutions for patients and publicly available.
Wojciech Szeląg spoke