Medical Device Market Investigations Extern 

ACT MEDICAL LTD has a clear purpose: we want to revolutionize the treatment of open wound catastrophic hemorrhage to reduce mortality from trauma.  In London, it takes 7 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. It only takes 5 minutes for a person to bleed to death.

Globally, nearly 1.5 million deaths occur every year due to violence induced uncontrolled hemorrhaging. In most cases, mortality from open wounds is caused by hypovolemic shock induced by hemorrhage. The treatment for this is to stop the bleeding as soon as possible, but current technologies can be inaccessible and slow, evidenced by the fact that half of all violent trauma related deaths occur before the patient has reached definitive care. There is a clear emergent need for innovative technologies to temporize hemorrhage as an emergency bridge to trauma surgery.

The REACT emergency balloon tamponade is a concept system for stemming hemorrhage from low-velocity wounds in the limbs, junctional regions, and potentially abdomen. The system uses expandable, silicon-based Tamponades to rapidly fill stab wounds – completely occluding the cavity and applying internal pressure directly to the wound site. The primary design focus for the system has been the treatment of stab wounds in the civilian environment – equipping first responding Police and Paramedics with faster tools for controlling bleeding, potentially saving thousands of lives a year globally.

This externship may be of interest to individuals who are curious about exploring the key fundamentals of the market that a startup desires to enter.  Markets are, at first glance, easy things to observe.  For a startup, however, entry to a market must be as selective and as strategic as possible.  Therefore, as much information about the current market must be determined early during product design planning, well before product launch.  Indeed, not only the current market conditions need to be accounted for, but the future of the market must be predicted, and even the past market conditions frequently need to be examined.

This externship will focus on the roiling market of wound care.  We will determine the market size from the addressable market to the available market to the obtainable market.  We will need to determine the major and the minor players in each of these markets, and uncover how dynamic the markets are: is there one behemoth company that crushes all entrants or is the market “fractured” with myriad small players with no consolidation?  We will look at the financial aspects of the market and of the players within the market to “follow the money”.  These patterns will be analyzed to become part of many strategic decisions that a startup must make.  We will use the Business Model Canvas to show how existing companies have engaged the market, make several competitive maps based on different conditions and predictions and then we will summarize the overall findings in a Powerpoint presentation. 

The skills acquired in this externship are readily transferrable into the private sector in many areas: business development, program management, market research, strategy, business transformation, clinical development, and many others. The basic format will consist of 2 weeks of training and hypothesis formation, 6 weeks of market analysis, and 2 final weeks dedicated to the development and refinement of the deliverable which will be presented to the CEO and the Head of Product.  While some parts of the externship deliverable will remain proprietary, where confidentiality will be expected, it will have aspects that can become part of an Extern’s portfolio. 

• Develop and test hypotheses about the commercial market for hemorrhage wound care.
• Perform market analysis including TAM/SAM/SOM, key players, a consolidation/fracture analysis, a gap analysis and a deal size analysis.
• Produce presentations of relevant knowledge.

Qualifications