Today EnteroMedics recorded revenue for the first time since it was incorporated nearly eight years ago. The company reported revenue of about $123,000 in the first quarter of the year from the sale of its Maestro RC implantable vagus nerve stimulation system for treating obesity. Revenue was generated through sales by its distribution partner in Australia.
This is an important step for an implantable device company that faced very tough times in 2009 after its US clinical trial failed to meet a critical effectiveness goal. EnteroMedics is currently conducting a pivotal trial that is expected to end in Q4 2012. EnteroMedics expects to file a premarket approval application with the FDA in the first half of 2013 if the data from the trial is positive.
Johns Hopkins’ Sridevi V. Sarma, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has devised new seizure detection software that, in early testing, significantly cuts the number of unneeded brain-stimulation therapy that an epilepsy patient would receive.
In 1965, Australian medical device pioneer Noel Gray established Telectronics – Australia’s first manufacturing facility for producing pacemakers that were designed in-house. Telectronics was an innovative developer, achieving some major successes in the early cardiac pacing field, for example, Telectronics’ leads allowed narrowing the pacing pulse to its current nominal of 0.5 milliseconds; encapsulating the pacemaker in titanium instead of epoxy; using a microplasma weld to join the two halves of the pacemaker capsule; creating one of the first rate-responsive ‘demand’ pacemakers; and isolating the pacemaker’s battery in a separate compartment to deal with the problem of leaking mercury-zinc batteries. 
Sensors for Medicine and Science, Inc. (SMSI) of Germantown, MD was founded in 1997 to develop chemical sensing technologies based on fluorescence sensing.
