Nordic Life Science 1
he Elmqvist pacemaker was developed by his compan
y Elema-Schönander AB, but shortly after the first operation the company was acquired by Siemens and in 1972 Siemens-Elema AB was founded. In 1994 the pacemaker division of the company was sold to the US company Pacesetter, which is and was a part of St. Jude Medical. “Within medtech we see a clear shift from patents that previously revolved around mechanical and electronic inventions towards the majority of inventions today being cross-disciplinary. Usually some kind of software is involved and we see for example many applications of AI and Machine Learning within the medtech area. This development places higher demands on those wishing to commercialize an invention because they need to interpret existing patents within a larger amount of technical areas, and they have to navigate correctly through a dense patent landscape.” MATHIAS LOQVIST, HEAD OF THE PATENT DEPARTMENT, GROTH & CO Another very important innovator behind the pacemaker was the electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch. He was working on an oscillator to aid in the recording of tachycardias at the University of Buffalo, USA, in 1960 when he accidentally discovered a way to make an implantable pacemaker (Aquilina, Images Paediatr Cardiol, 2006). The oscillator required a 10 KΩ resistor at the transistor base, but Greatbatch misread the color coding on his resistor box and got a 1 MΩ resistor by mistake. When he plugged in the resistor the circuit started to “squeg” with a 1.8 millisecond pulse followed by a 1 second interval during which the transistor was cut off and drew practically no current. He realized that this small device could drive a human heart. In 1959, he patented his pacemaker, and William Chardack, Chief of Surgery at Buffalo’s Veteran’s Hospital, reported the first success in a human with this unit in 1960. It was also Wilson Greatbatch who convinced the industry to change from mercury to lithium-iodine cells. Early pacemaker batteries had short, unreliable lifetimes until he developed the long-life lithium-battery in the 1970s. The first pacemaker using a lithium-ion battery was introduced and implanted in a patient in 1972 (source: The Central Intelligence Agency). Greatbatch’s battery soon became used in more than 90 percent of the world’s pacemakers. His innovation gave the pacemaker reliability and the long lifetime needed for it to become standard in cardiac care. With Greatbatch’s battery a patient could expect to only have one pacemaker inserted during his or her lifetime. 84 ”In 1994, when Pacesetter and its owner, St. Jude Medical, acquired the pacemaker division from the company that Rune Elmqvist founded, this spurred innovation and patenting work. Over a period of ten years Groth & Co both wrote and applied around 50 patents originating from the company’s facility in Järfälla that related to the pacemaker. These patents concerned improvements within most of the pacemaker’s functions. Patent filings were perhaps primarily within the detection of deviating heart rhythms, but also to some degree concerned the battery and its capacity, status and process of replacement,” says Mathias Loqvist, Head of the Patent Department, Groth & Co. In 2011, the pacemaker left Sweden when St. Jude Medical moved their manufacturing of pacemakers and electrodes to facilities in Malaysia and Puerto Rico and shifted R&D focus. Around 450 out of 600 employees lost their jobs. Today the remaining staff are focusing on developing products and services built on communication with pacemakers, which nowadays have a small radio antenna. For example, the new developments can be technology to monitor health and analyze how the information can be used in a new way. NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG