BY THE NUMBERS
AtriCure Inc. makes devices used in heart surgery.
$82 million total revenues in 2013
$103 million to $105 million revenues projected for 2014
300-plus employees worldwide including the current West Chester Twp. headquarters and satellite offices in Amsterdam, California and Minnesota
Growing medical device maker AtriCure Inc. starts construction this month on a new landmark headquarters in Mason with additional manufacturing and research space.
Prior to a groundbreaking ceremony held Tuesday, Aug. 26, Chief Executive Officer Mike Carrel sat down with this newspaper for an interview about the company’s seemingly high-speed trajectory.
Presently, AtriCure is based in Butler County’s West Chester Twp. Once construction on the new Innovation Way building is complete, the company will move approximately 200 local employees to Warren County.
Can you elaborate on the products you make and the market that you’re serving?
Carrel: "Our best selling products are our ablation products that treat atrial fibrillation.
“Atrial fibrillation affects (millions of) people around the world
“That market if you think about it is a multi-billion revenue market, for not just us, but others. Big players are in this space and we are the leader on the surgical ablation side and about 80 percent of our revenue comes from ablation.”
What’s next in the pipeline?
Carrel: "We've got the only FDA –approved product in the market today for the treatment of atrial fibrillation and so a big part of what we're doing right now is actually educating and training surgeons and a big part of the site here is going to be an educational training center to bring surgeons in to get trained to utilize the product safely and effectively.
“That’s really one of the biggest growth drivers.
“We want to break our business into three different categories: one is (the) clinical side of our business. We’ve got clinical science to get the data to prove our technologies work and we’ve got three major FDA trials that are underway right now.
“Two is education, training the physicians to do the procedure right, making sure they’re aware of what a good procedure this is and then three is to come up with new products with innovation
“The new products we’ve got coming out are new advances around ablation. We’re doing a lot within the cryo space. Cryo is a freezing aspect of it and then (radio frequency) technologies.”
Where do you go from here? Will you continue to be research focused and invest a lot of money in research or do you see that waning and mass production growing?
Carrel: "In the short term, our focus is on the research and development side of the business, on the education and training. We are definitely going to have losses for the foreseeable future.
“We could be profitable next year if we wanted to be, but we like to stay close enough to profitability that we could be, but we’re investing in creating a market. We’re creating and we’re really the leader in this space. In order to do that, we’ve got to really push the envelope and spend the money in these key areas.
“We’ve raised money to put on our balance sheet for our investors so that we can invest in this because our investors look and say you’re $100 million business. This is a $25 billion market overall. In order to capture some of that market you need to be investing in key areas.
“We’re such a small little player right now.”
You’ve said both that you’re a small player, but you are leader in what you do. So explain that to me?
Carrel: "When you have AFib, the first thing that your doctor will do will likely try to put you on medication. A big portion of that $25 billion is drugs. We're never going to capture all that.
“… Now, the drugs only work in 50 percent of those patients. When the drugs don’t work or if they take them for a period of time, they become (used) to them, they can no longer take them.
“… if those drugs don’t work, you kind of go into two different branches. The first branch is you have some other structural heart disease. Meaning you’ve got a valve problem…or you need to have a coronary bypass procedure. In order to do that, they need to crack your chest open.
“If you’re already going in for that, there are 750,000 people that go in for open heart surgery every year. Of those, one-third have AFib when they go in. Those 250,000 patients that go in every year, only 50,000 are getting treated. 200,000 we should be treating with our surgical products.
“That’s where we lead because we’re the only approved product to treat atrial fibrillation at that point in time.
“That market right there is a half a billion dollar market, maybe a billion.
“…If I don’t have any structural heart disease, or the only disease you have is AFib, then it comes down to what type of AFib do you have? Do you have what they call occasional Afib, by which they can treat you with catheters.
“Big, big companies are in that.
“…However, that doesn’t work very often for the more complex, or continuous AFib patients and they need surgery. So we have a product in that space as well for minimally invasive ablation.
“That’s one of our clinical trials right now to get on label to basically sell that product.
That market is a billion-plus market by itself.
“…$1 to $2 billion of that [$25 billion] market could be addressed by us.”
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