Veran
Aug 01, 2007
Nashville, August 1, 2007 – Veran Medical Technologies, a private medical technology company, has named Mark W. Hunter to its executive management team in the role of Vice President of Strategy and Operations reporting to Veran CEO, Jerome R. Edwards. Hunter will be responsible for scaling the company’s manufacturing and operations capabilities as it prepares to go to market in the Interventional Oncology market delivering biopsy and ablative therapies. In addition, Veran will leverage Hunter’s wealth of business development experience and he will play a key role in defining the company’s future strategy.
“I am excited to have Mark join the Veran team,” said Jerome Edwards, CEO of Veran Medical Technologies. “I have known Mark for over a decade and have a deep respect for his intelligence and ability to build and market medical technologies. Further, there is no one who knows our technology space and intellectual property landscape better than Mark – it is definitely a compliment to Veran and its Technology that Mark would choose to join the company. We look forward to building delivery systems for the next generation of minimally invasive therapies”.
Hunter brings a wealth of experience to Veran. As co-founder of Surgical Navigation Technologies (SNT), out of Southern Illinois University, Hunter secured an equity position when the Sofamor Danek Group (formerly NYSE:SDG) acquired SNT. He was also instrumental in moving the company to Colorado and helping to grow the business from initial concept to over $140MM in annual revenue. SNT is now the Navigation division of Medtronic (NYSE:MDT), in which Hunter held executive roles in engineering, operations and business development. Hunter has over 12 issued patents in his name and several more pending. Hunter brings an unquantifiable wealth of experience to the Veran team. Hunter received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Veran Medical Technologies Southern Illinois University.
Veran is a privately held medical device company headquartered in St. Louis, MO. The company’s mission is to empower physicians to diagnose cancer earlier and to enable precision therapy to save lives. In the United States, lung cancer kills more people each year than breast, prostate, pancreatic and colon cancers combined.
Veran has developed and commercialized an FDA cleared, next generation electromagnetic thoracic navigation platform called the SPiN Thoracic Navigation System®. Veran’s breakthrough technology has been adopted by leading cancer centers throughout the United States. Veran provides physicians with a full line of bronchoscopic brushes, needles, forceps and steerable catheters with tiny electromagnetic sensors embedded in the tips for precise navigation. The combination of these proprietary Always-On Tip Tracked® instruments and Veran’s exclusive patient respiratory gating technology enables physicians to accurately access lung nodules by accounting for nodule movement during patient breathing, a common challenge for lung specialists.
Another challenge lung specialists face is that approximately 40% of lung nodules lie outside of an airway, making them very difficult to reach endobronchially, and traditionally requiring an additional procedure. Veran’s SPiN Thoracic Navigation System® is the first and only FDA cleared technology that enables Pulmonologists or Thoracic Surgeons to safely and accurately access lung nodules outside of an airway using SPiN Perc®, a navigated transthoracic needle. With SPiN Perc®, Veran combines endobronchial navigation with percutaneous navigation, allowing physicians to access all lung nodules in a single procedure, regardless of nodule size or location. This eliminates the cost and risk of unnecessary procedures and empowers physicians to provide a same day diagnosis for their patients. The early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer has been proven to save lives.