Nick Woods is CEO of Tissuemed Ltd, based in Leeds. Tissuemed, a specialist medtech company, develops and manufactures the TissuePatch brand of self-adhesive sealant films for use in surgery.
What are your main priorities as CEO of Tissuemed? How do you divide your time between different aspects of the business?
Tissuemed has a great opportunity before it in the form of its adhesive surgical film. We have a new technology there that surgeons are telling us can really help them do their job, improve patient outcomes and, crucially, provide economic benefits. Our main priority is to ensure that this technology is adopted by surgeons as standard of care – so it’s about ensuring we’re communicating with enough potential users in the right way and helping them see what TissuePatch can do for them.
Regarding how I divide my time: that’s a very pertinent question, because Tissuemed is an R&D company with on-site manufacturing including chemical synthesis, full regulatory department, sales and marketing. As you might imagine, keeping all the plates spinning as a small entity is challenging, so I wouldn’t claim to have a formula for how I divide my time.
In fact it’s an easy question: the people who run our different departments function so well that my interventions are mostly limited, with my predominant focus being on sales and marketing.
How have Tissuemed and its products developed?
The company was founded in 1985 by surgeons from Killingbeck Hospital in Leeds. It originally developed tissue heart valves, that side of the business being divested in 1999. Since that time, the focus has been on developing polymer-based methods of enhancing the closure of internal wounds during surgery.
Initially we worked on light-activated glues; but for the past seven years all focus has been on developing adhesive sheets that bond to the proteins on tissue surfaces, and as such provide almost a secondary closure over the sutures or staples. It’s easiest to think of our product as ‘clingfilm’ for surgeons, except that it adheres to the tissues with far greater strength.
Tissuemed has just announced 100% sales growth in the last 12 months. To what strategies would you attribute the company’s success?
I think we’ve got a well-developed product offering that has come about through actively listening to surgeons and observing their needs. I think our success has come from our experience in understanding the surgical field, coupled with the adaptability and all-round brilliance of our chemists in developing the technology. That and persistence… this has been a seven-year process!
Quite incredibly, we do everything under one roof: from synthesising the sticky polymers through to casting the synthetic absorbable materials into fine multilayered films. It’s a highly skilled operation with a great deal of know-how, so we prefer to keep it in-house as far as possible. I’ve only been involved with Tissuemed for a couple of years, but those who’ve brought it to where it is today should feel very proud of what they’ve achieved. It’s no mean feat.
How does Tissuemed plan to deal with the challenges of the business climate in the coming years?
I think we’re in really good shape in that regard. There’s no doubt that healthcare providers across the world are increasingly recognising the place of new technology in their quest to provide better outcomes, clinically and economically. I think it’s highly desirable for new technologies to tick the boxes of reducing surgical time, reducing patient complications, improving surgical outcomes and, in so doing, reducing in-patient stay.
Leakage of wounds created in internal organs are something of an occupational hazard. In lung surgery, for example, something like 10% of cases have residual air leaks post-surgery that take many days to resolve. We’re collecting data to suggest that by applying our film over the resection staple line, air leaks are significantly reduced and patient stay comes down as a result.
The same is true in neuro- and spinal surgery, where leaks of cerebrospinal fluid can be extremely problematic and can even require further operations. Simply by covering the potentially leaky area with our absorbable film, the surgeon is able to stop the leak pretty much instantly; the product then disappears over time as the wound heals.
You could say the business climate favours our product, because of the pressure on hospitals to cut costs while improving outcomes. But then, when did anyone not want to improve patient outcomes? Our product would always have been in demand, but in the present economic climate it’s truly needed – and we’ve been ready to take advantage of that need through an effective sales and marketing operation.