The Beat Goes On, With Their Device's Help

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In a modest industrial park building just outside of Pittsburgh, Pa., a small company called Medrad Inc. is refining a heart device that could save many of the 300,000 Americans who die of cardiac arrest each year.

Medrad's work on the AID Defibrillator, a small, implantable device that automatically shocks a fluttering heart back into normal beating patterns when it senses an accelerated rate, has put the little-known medical instrumentation company on the high-tech map. Though it was invented in the late '60s by heart specialist Dr. Michel Mirowski, the device wasn't ready for human implantation until 1980, after seven years of work by Medrad's medical and technical engineers.

Medrad took over the development of the minidefibrillator for Mirowski in 1973, after another medical technology company failed to come up with a workable model. "The current design," says Dr. Stephen Heilman, Medrad's president and part-owner, "is the last in a succession of trial and error models."

To finance the effort, Heilman put $3 million into the project and took outside jobs to support himself. "We felt it was worth it," he says, "because the device could save so many lives."

By February 1980, the AID Defibrillator and Medrad were out of the laboratories and into the pages of national medical journals and newsweeklies. The device had finally been successfully implanted in a heart patient. "Since then," notes Heilman, "it has been placed in over 25 patients at Johns Hopkins and Standford medical centers."

Though the Food and Drug Administration hasn't yet approved the defibrillator for the market, AID refinements and clinical evaluations will be speeded along by the $1.8 million in venture capital from private sources.