82 Cardio-Vascular Co’s And Growing

Israel leads the world in the number of cardio-vascular medical device companies, said Prof. Rafael Beyar in a presentation at the ICI-Innovations in Cardiovascular Interventions conference. Prof. Beyar, who is the Rambam Medical Center director- general noted that 56 percent of the local life sciences industry is devoted to the development of medical equipment, 20% to biotechnology and 12% to drug development. Medical equipment innovation deals primarily with implants and single- use equipment such as stents and artificial heart valves and devices to open clogged arteries. There are 212 Israeli companies involved in developments in medical technology; 82 of them work solely in cardiovascular devices. Israel is highly respected as as innovator in medicine. “If Israel were compared to Silicon Valley in California, it has about the same number of residents and also the same number of companies in the life sciences,” said Beyar. The world’s medical equipment industry comprises $200 billion, when half of that amount is utilized in the US alone. Some 35% of that amount goes to the cardiovascular field. Israeli medical equipment exports totaled $1.5 billion last year, an increase of 9% over 2009. Between January and September of this year alone, the figure rose by 15% to $1.2 billion. Some 1,000 experts from Israel and abroad are attending the three-day meeting.