Boston Scientific Co-founder John Abele Recognized by TCT Career Achievement Award


John AbeleJohn Abele, long respected for his contributions to the medical industry, received the TCT 2015 Career Achievement Award on Monday in the Main Arena. Most notably, Abele helped foster the growth of interventional cardiology and, in 1979, co-founded Boston Scientific. 

“More than anyone, John Abele, over the course of his distinguished career, has been the bridge, conduit and catalyst encouraging and facilitating the collaborative relationship between the medical device industry and physician scientists for the purpose of improving cardiovascular health care,” said TCT Director Martin B. Leon, MD.

“John is part philosopher, part engineer, part inventor and part businessman—bringing these parts together into a creative whole makes for a unique and profound thought leader in our field,” he continued. “His impact on the growth of interventional cardiology, starting from the inception of angioplasty just short of 40 years ago, has been immeasurable.”

Career parallels shifts in industry 

Not long after graduating from Amherst College in 1959 with a degree in philosophy and physics, Abele had second thoughts about pursuing a career in physics and instead ended up at a small company called Advanced Instruments. In addition to making breakthrough laboratory instruments (eg, osmometers and flame photometers), the company represented Medtronic products, like external pacemakers, in the Northeast, and Abele became intrigued with medical devices.

“I’ve always loved gadgets,” Abele told TCT Daily, “and after a while, I found that the people who use the technology are fascinating—and they’re willing to educate you.”

The fact that his company was developing disruptive technology meant a lot of effort had to be directed toward educating users and overcoming resistance from various medical specialties. “It turns out I enjoyed the idea of changing people’s minds and helping change their culture,” he says. Most of all, he was taken with the notion that patients could be treated not only less invasively but also with less trauma, lower cost and shorter recovery time.

In 1965, Abele helped found an association aimed at establishing standards for medical instruments. On the board, he interacted with pioneers like cardiac surgeons Michael DeBakey, MD; Denton Cooley, MD; and Dwight Harken, MD, becoming fascinated with what it takes to transform novel technologies into tools for practicing clinicians.

After working part-time as a consultant and researching early-stage companies, Abele joined a small Massachusetts-based contract R&D company called Medi-Tech in 1969, with an option to buy, and the next year found an investor to help him buy it. One of the company’s many products, developed by an inventor named Itzhak Bentov, was a steerable multilumen catheter.

A turn toward cardiology 

In 1974, Andreas Gruentzig, MD, inspired by early work in peripheral angioplasty, was using home-built balloon catheters to dilate coronary arteries in animals. When Gruentzig contacted Medi-Tech expressing interest in a steerable catheter, Abele not only sent him some catheters but the next year visited him in Zurich, Switzerland. Soon after, Gruentzig visited Medi-Tech.

When Gruentzig presented the results of his preclinical studies at the 1976 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions, Abele introduced him to cardiologist Richard K. Myler, MD. The next year, Gruentzig and Myler performed the first human coronary angioplasty intraoperatively during bypass surgery in San Francisco, Calif. “My role was to introduce Gruentzig to people in the United States who would be credible—although he himself was an impressive researcher and presenter,” Abele recalled.

Gruentzig’s live demonstration courses in Zurich beginning in 1978 are legendary, but Abele also had a hand in promoting this kind of education. Several years prior, he had helped to develop a prototype course involving a new gastrointestinal endoscopic procedure that employed closed-circuit television.

“The ‘live’ aspect exponentially increases learning” by providing a variety of perspectives and encouraging collaboration, Abele noted, explaining that true collaboration requires openness to unease and dissent. This sort of managed discord has contributed to the development of new subspecialties, including interventional cardiology.

“When you’re trying to promote a disruptive technology, you have to spend a lot more time getting to know the people who are influential both for and against the procedure. The successful change agents are nonestablishment figures with the skills to communicate with a hostile audience and earn respect, if not support, from their superiors who may become disrupted—understanding how they work and the best way to go from where you are to where you want to be,” said Abele, who also sponsored the 1997 documentary “PTCA: A History.”

Along with Myler, Abele supported another Gruentzig signature strategy: the use of registries. In contrast with clinical trials, registries are “the broadest and most successful way of documenting the evolution and the critical [needs] of a rapidly moving technology,” he said.

Boston Scientific is born 

In 1979, Abele partnered with a former pharmaceutical executive, Peter Nicholas, to form Boston Scientific for the purpose of purchasing Medi-Tech. Abele soon became a regular contributor to textbooks, medical journals, televised tutorials and live seminars on angioplasty, underlining the company’s focus on education.

In 1992, Boston Scientific went public. Two years later, the company initiated a series of acquisitions, including that of leading catheter maker SciMed, which made it a multibillion-dollar business and eventually a heavyweight in the interventional cardiology device market. Among the cath lab stalwarts launched by Boston Scientific were the Taxus Express2 paclitaxel-eluting stent and the Synergy bioabsorbable-polymer stent.

Abele evolved into a kind of “corporate philosopher” in the late 1990s, articulating the company’s vision and values. He retired from Boston Scientific in 2005. Nonetheless, Abele keeps an eye on new directions in interventional technology—drug-coated balloons and bioresorbable stents, for instance, may fulfill the vision of doing the least necessary and allowing diseased vessels to heal. He predicts that medical technology will increasingly converge with pharma, exploiting molecular techniques, such as DNA editing.

Furthering education, philanthropy 

Since retirement, Abele has shared his insights into how disruptive technology reaches the mainstream in many speeches and articles, garnering numerous awards and honors along the way. He continues to apply the principles that guided his earlier career to broader fields, including ecology and science education. For example, Abele has been a leader and supporter of FIRST, an organization devoted to stimulating children’s interest in science and technology, in particular through its robotics competitions. He also maintains the Ontario, Canada-based Kingbridge Conference Centre, which experiments with new methods for promoting collective intelligence.

He lives with his wife and dog on a farm in Vermont where he promotes the generation of local energy, with 15 acres of solar panels as well as a project exploring biomass fuels. He also serves on the board of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit devoted to finding efficient ways to achieve sustainable alternative energy. In 1997 Abele founded the Argosy Foundation, which continues to fund projects in a variety of fields, favoring those that provide “best practice” examples for others.

 

 

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