Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Evolving the Sales Model with Product Maturity: Interview with AVITA Medical CEO James Corbett

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we had a really engaging conversation with James (Jim) Corbett, CEO of AVITA Medical.AVITA Medical’s RECELL system uses Spray-On Skin Cell technology to accelerate healing for patients with severe burns and wounds.  Jim brings nearly 40 years of medical device leadership experience to AVITA Medical. His career spans global commercial and operational roles, including President of Boston Scientific and General Manager of Scimed Life Systems. Jim has served as CEO of six companies, including three publicly traded entities — Microtherapeutics, ev3, and Alphatec Spine — as well as CathWorks, Home Diagnostics, and Vertos Medical.In this interview, Jim shares lessons from a career spanning global medtech leadership positions — including the importance of hands-on fundraising, adapting sales strategies as products mature, and how generating clinical evidence beyond FDA requirements serves commercial adoption.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and 3 packages that will help you make use of our database of 750+ life science investors more efficiently for your fundraise and help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VII. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Jim Corbett.

We're focusing on the technical competence of our team. That's everything. Here we utilize the MSL model also, Medical Science Leosin. And their role is to get the physicians to do studies and get on the podium and cause research to happen, including that which we do not control. That in its aggregate is a real important learning. real important learning and not thought enough about it by many. Hey everyone, it's Scott.

In this episode of Medsider, I sat down with Jim Corbett, CEO of Avita Medical, a role he took on in September 22 after initially joining the company's board in June of 21. He brings nearly 40 years of medical device leadership experience to the company. Jim's career spans global commercial and operational roles, including president of Boston Scientific and GM of SciMed. Jim has served as CEO of six different companies, including three publicly traded entities, and Microtherapeutics, EB3, and Athletic Spine, as well as CathWorks, Home Diagnostics, and Vertos Medical. Here, a few of the key things that we discussed in this conversation.

First, generate additional clinical evidence beyond regulatory requirements to accelerate market adoption and physician confidence. Avita exemplified this approach by delivering over 300 podium presentations at major medical conferences and completing five PMAs, far beyond what regulatory authorities demanded. Viewing clinical studies as an ongoing commercial investment creates a foundation that enables physicians to confidently adopt new technologies, especially when expanding into specialties that may initially seem foreign. Second, adapt commercial strategies to match product maturity. Rather than maintaining static sales models throughout commercialization, Aveda transitioned from a specialist heavy model with clinical experts supporting every two sales reps to a streamlined approach

where experienced reps handle the entire sales process independently. Early stage products require intensive clinical support to educate physicians, but as adoption matures, the sales force must develop technical competence to operate efficiently without extensive specialist backup. Third, own the fundraise. The best capital strategy is a DIY one. Jim urges CEOs to lead fundraising themselves, not just to close the round, but to learn what resonates and refine the pitch in real time. This hands-on approach provides invaluable market feedback that gets lost when intermediaries get too involved. Just as important, he warns against chasing a build-to-sell strategy. The most attractive companies are those focused on long-term value, delivering real

customer outcomes, executing well, and building sustainably. All right, before we dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume 7 of Medsiter Mentors is now live. This latest edition highlights key takeaways from recent Medsider interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Bill Hunter, CEO of Canary Medical, Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health and other proven medtech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it.

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In addition to every volume of Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to our entire interview, library dating back to 2010. You'll also get Medsider Playbooks, curated guides packed with actionable insights and topics like fundraising, regulatory challenges, reimbursement strategies, and more. And if you're fundraising, don't miss our exclusive investor database, featuring over 750 life science BCs, family offices, and angels. We've even created three custom packages to help you with your next fundraise. Learn more about Medsider mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's dive in the interview.

All right, Jim, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Scott. This would be a lot of fun, especially considering your pretty story career in Med Tech. So I recorded a very short buyout at the outset of this episode. But I like to start there. I mean, if you have like a two to three minutes summary, right, of kind of, you know, how you got started in the device space and kind of, you know, what led up to you

joining Avita as the CEO. Well, you know, I'm not sure I could do that in two or three minutes. But, you know, I've spent my career in medical devices. And I started in sales and originally working for Warner Lambert. Then I went to work for Edwards, who was owned by American Hospital Supply at that time, in sales. And I spent a good part of my early career with them, progressing and through various roles and ended up moving to Tokyo. So I became a global executive from my University of Kansas background, you know, naturally. But that led to being in Japan was like career changing.

because you're basically upside down in a place where you can't get help on any problem, and you have to figure it out on your own. You have to solve it. And if you do that, things go well. And if you don't, they don't. And it's a very accountable place. I went from there to the interventional business, because that was a critical care and surgery,

and I went to Siamid Life Systems, which is the cardiology business of Boston today. And what we did there that was really innovative, is we globalized SIMED, one of the first device companies to really become a direct global business manufacturing R&D, direct in all major markets. In one year, we went direct in all of the EU and Japan at the same time, and built a factory. So just like the amount of learning and change, and it was such an advantage competitively because everyone else were in these country-based distributor models.

We merged with Boston Scientific, who was, Simon, it was almost 50-50 when we merged International versus U.S. And when we merged with Boston Scientific, we were both about $450 million, but they were 10%

international, but they were much more diversified in product offering. So we then basically globalized their other businesses into this model that we built at Simon. That was a In combination, it was nearly 32 quarters in a row of 50% growth. Wow.

It was just kind of extraordinary. And at the same time, I had the innovation itch. And I went to a company at the time called Home Diagnostics. And the big innovation there was how do you compete in glucose monitoring when you've got basically a $25 million business and you're competing as J&J and Roche and all those guys? And what we did, you went to Walgreens with a store brand idea. So here, how about this? And they said, oh, you'll do that?

Oh, yeah. And I said, in fact, you'll win on margin. The customer will win it on price and we'll win by becoming a relevant player. That business is today, the number three glucose monitoring player. And nearly every retail pharmacy store brand is that product today. No kidding. It's a billion dollar business. And, you know, so from there, I went to work with Warburg-Pinkus, and my charter was interesting.

Build an endovascular company. I said, any more guidance than that? And no, that's what we're looking for from you. And we basically built the company EB-3, which was a neurovascular and a peripheral artery disease business based in Minneapolis and a Irvine, which we also globalized. and we had extraordinary growth over the next eight years. We bought technologies typically and then commercialized, and we solved some really great problems. Underlying the peripheral business, for example,

was the capacity created by the creation of the drug-coated coronary stent, which happened in my Simon in Boston years. And what happened is retreatment rate for cabbage was about one in three at 12 months. That was about the same for PTCA. When you went to stents, that became 1 in 5, and when you went to drug code distance, it became 7 in 100. So suddenly, the cardiologists had all this capacity, and so we developed products to treat what we thought

would be the derivative diseases, which were neurovascular and peripheral vascular diseases. And, of course, it turned out to be right. And in the early days, were really interesting because, you know, we, you had great moments. I remember we had this piano prodigy in Colorado and musical prodigy. She was a musician. She was 17 years old.

And we had developed this treatment for arterial venous malformations, which is like a bird's nest in your brain. And the doctor said, you know, we can treat you, but you won't be a mutual. So we did this rather complicated transaction where we sponsored. the cutting of a CD, the doctor contributed his time free. We gave free product and the hospital got paid by the proceeds from the CD if I got all the details right. This is like 2003 or 4. And a year later, she was playing at our performing at our company meeting. Oh, wow. Wow.

You know, those kinds of stories happen throughout this experience. You know, and with Of course, from there, you know, I decided I wanted to start another company, so I created a, the product was for interventional pain and it treated neurogenic collocation, which is basically you stand and walk and your spinal canal is narrow. And the invention through the, a portal the size of a baby aspirin using imaging, you would deep bulk the ligament and flavum, which normally is four millimeters. In these patients, it's 10. And basically, you shave it off from the back. And And lo and behold, that company recently was acquired by Stryker for something in the order of $500 million.

And that was Verdos. That was Verdoz. Yeah. And I thought I needed to do a turnaround. You know, so I went to AlphaTech Spine, which so is spinal implants and it was a public company and had all kinds of financial problems. And it was a turnaround. And we did turn it around.

We had to sell off assets to do it. And I learned something. And my belief doing it when I was recruited was that all the skills of all the growth companies they had done would be applicable to a company in financial distress. The good news and bad news about that is that the good news was I was right. The bad news, it's way less happier the moment because what you're doing is you're solving a problem where we're losing people because they're worried about their security. and you can't recruit anybody

because they don't want to walk into something that might not be stable. And at one point, I remember the head of human resources who was really a terrific executive, and she said, you know, Jim, we ought to have employee meetings because when we have them,

you really get people energized and you really have them feel good. And I remember saying to her, look, I've been trying to fix this for 18 months. I'm not sure I believe me. You know, so we ended up doing a transaction with Globus that allowed us to get to capital to restructure the company and pay off the debt. And I went off to do, you know, another thing. And which, which, of course, is exactly what you expect from this Kansas guy.

Because I became a CEO of a company called Cathworks, which is currently in a strategic partnership with Metronic. But it's a software company based in Tel Aviv, you know. And I don't know how many of it. listeners will capture this subtle joke. They said, well, how was it in language and culture dealing with the Israelis? I said, well, you know, it was a software company. I said, but not anybody, nobody spoke Fortran. Of course, not many people even know what Fortran is. That would be the programming language of the 1970s. And, you know, what are you talking about? Is that, is that a language that I'm unfamiliar with in Israel?

Oh, yeah. It's like, well, at that time, Cobalt and Fortran were the, you know, Python and basic now. But, and of course, we have chat GPG rather than that. And that was a really interesting because it helped diagnose the software. It would analyze the angiogram and rebuild a three-dimensional tree where you could measure the fractional flow reserve, but with a cursor. Go to any spot on the tree and know. whether there was any blockage there. It was miraculous. So they're in a process with Metronica

the last few years. But along the way, I got recruited to Evita and as a board member. And I looked at Avita and I said to myself, oh, really, this is unbelievable. Spray on skin expands the biopsy 80 to 1, 80 to 1. And then I started reading about the patients. So we had these patients, like we had, And she's done some public work for us, so I think I can use her name. Charlie Xavier is her name. She had an 85% total body service area. And it's like the musician. She had an industrial accident.

And when she was admitted to the hospital, the doctor said to her husband, with good luck, we could keep her alive for a year in the ICU before she dies. Six months later, she walks out of the hospital. Couldn't do that without resell. No chance. Since that time, about a year and a half later, she was the keynote speaker at our national sales meeting after I had become CEO. And she's a terrific, she's like the reason to be. You think about, you know, all of these businesses have the stories like I shared with the musician, with Charlie, you know, because in medical devices, what we do is we solve a problem that ultimately changes someone's life.

You know, whether you can walk down the street with Vertos, or whether you're treating an AVM with EB3, or whether you're opening up the artery in their legs so they can play golf again. I mean, these are all the reasons to be. And in a Vita, it's particularly poignant because these people are going to die. they would not live with the amount of skin they have and they need skin graft.

And as we've evolved the beta, there's been a number of things, but in my short, that was more than three minutes. But that tells you the journey. Yeah, the breadth of your experience. Yeah, we could probably literally spend, I can easily spend the next 45 minutes just like, you know, like hearing you share stories, right? But, you know, it's interesting that you bring up and you kind of touched on a lot of these patient stories. But I think that's anyone that operates in our space, right, in med tech and medical devices, you at one point encounter one of those stories, right? And it really, it really drives home how rewarding it is.

I mean, this is an incredibly difficult, you know, game to play, right? And especially if you're building startups, but it's so rewarding. I mean, it's unlike, you know, most categories, right? You just to see the impact, right, that you have in someone's, you know, in someone's life is pretty special. It really is. And it's what makes it satisfying. You know, we did it.

at a Vita showcase recently. So you can go find it on the web real easily. But in it, we have four patient stories. And these patients know that they survived because of our technology, that they have a life because of it. That they got out of the hospital earlier than they would have otherwise. They were home with their families sooner than they would have otherwise. Sometimes not at all.

So it's like, you know, I kind of get emotional about it every time. It doesn't ever change. Yeah, I don't blame you. I'm looking at the website now. It's Avitamedical.com for everyone listening, A-V-I-T-A-Medical.com, just as it sounds. We'll link to it in the full write-up on Medsider. But you mentioned spray on skin, right?

So maybe at least cover that at a high level as if I'm a middle school student. I have no idea what this is. Imagine that you, for one reason, or another industrial fire accident, had a burn that covered your whole back. And the whole back needed to be skin grafted. It's a little bit like carpeting. So wall-to-wall carpeting, normally you need skin graft that would cover the whole wall-to-wall. In the case of resale, you can take a biopsy that's smaller than a credit card. We then disaggregate the cells and an enzyme, suspended the cells in a buffering solution. Now, it's a very unique process because part of the role the enzyme is to release the links that hold skin cells together.

Inherent in that is cytotoxicity, where it kills the cells. So what you have to do is adjust the pH, which we do, we have an additive, so it doesn't kill them. Then the next thing you have to do is worry about the cells surviving in the buffering solution. so we put glucose in it to feed them. So this creates what we call cell viability in the suspension. So then what you do is you take a graft that is much smaller, 90% smaller, that you put into what's called split thickness skin graft, but basically you mesh it and it's like a fish net.

So instead of going wall to wall, you're a fish net. And then you spray the spray on. cells on top of it and it fills in all space. So you expand it 80 to 1. And what happens is the patients heal faster, about 30% faster. So if you can imagine time to graft. So the first thing they do, I just gave you the end. They sprayed on the graft. Now you cover it and they grow. And they have all the components of skin, you know, pigment cells, fibroblasts that grow. And but they, because they're alive, they can grab on, right?

And they can proliferate. Now, what's happened right before that is often a two-stage procedure where you have to remove all that burned skin. And it makes a very deep wound. and often you have to put in what's called a dermal matrix to re-vascularize so you can receive a skin graft and receive the spray on cell and it has a place to grab onto without a big hole. And that's our new product called cohelix. And cohelix is made from bovine collagen. So two-stage procedure is you do a dermal matrix and then you do resell.

we think in our pre-clinical work and what's happening in our early human launch in about seven to ten days, you apply the split thickly skin graft and the spray on skin. And then you cover it with our dressing called permuterum, which is a biosynthetic oris,

and you can see through it. So you don't lift up those dressing to see if the skin cells are okay because when you do that, you tear off the skin that's growing. So it's a very, rather complex treatment time. But in our case, our theme is faster healing.

In our portfolio, the same wound, same doctor, same patient. And the objective is get out of the hospital soon. Got it. You get there faster. Our dermal matrix looks to get graft ready seven to 14 days faster than the current products on the market. And resell versus a standard of skin.

graph reduces it by 30%. So in the aggregate, you're talking, these are $10,000 a day patients. From the hospital point of view, not to digress too much, we had a case where a family in a, let's just say, a Midwestern state, okay? They were in a mass event. Some of the patients went to a burn center 200 miles to the north,

and some went to a burn center 100 miles to the south. The ones in the south have used resale, ones in the north did it. The ones on the south healed so much faster, they were visiting. Oh, wow. On the north and asking the doctor why he didn't use resell because they were already healing and they've been in the same injury. So when you think about this spray on skin cells, you're talking about something that's transformational. Yeah, no doubt. And especially with the, I guess, the nature, right, of the patients you're probably typically

treating, right? It's like, you know, a couple days really does matter, right? And it sounds like you're obviously improving upon that to an even, even greater degree. So you just reference sort of the economic play as well, the economic story. I mean, the faster patients get out of the hospital, less expensive it is for payers for everyone. But, you know, yeah, time is a big deal here. So of those three products you just mentioned, is resell the only one that's active, you're actively commercializing then? Actually, as I've been able to first, they're all in full launch. Oh, full launch. Okay. You're full launch with all three. Okay. Yeah. And we did something really interesting with resale, too, last year.

We developed Resel Go. Now, resale was a manual procedure where you would take the biopsy, which is like five or six microns thick. That's the objective, half the size of a credit card. If you want to know how big it really is, it's a little tiny post-it note. That's how thin it is. And that's about the little diagonal, two-by-two set of meters. So you would take that, soak it, and then hand scrape it. Okay.

We developed a processing device like a food processor. There's a disposable cartridge which has the wells of the, where you put the skin and the enzyme and the buffer, and you put it in and press the button, it does it. So what you could do is instead of spending 25 minutes doing the work, of the scraping work, you can, especially when you're doing two or more, because you use one for every 10% total body surface area, right?

So when you have two going, you can take the biopsy at the beginning of the procedure, put them in the corner, press go, and go treat the patient. And so Resale Go is fully launched. It's almost three-fourths of our business is converted to it. Cohelix went in the full launch April 1, and Permiterm is been in launch, and we were building the evidence but we started two trials, both post-market in Q1, started enrollment of both, creatively named cohelix 1 and permiderm 1, you know. Sometimes you've got to simplify things, right?

What that says is that we're going to call it, studies like that often have some acronym that goes with. And in this case, what I'm really telegraphing with the Roman numeral 1 is that there's going to be. be a two or three. This is something that gets lost, by the way. Probably one of the most unique things about Avita is our focus on clinical data. We have had over 300 abstracts podium presentations done at major medical conferences on resale, and we're going to do the same with Permiterm and Coelix. We've done five PMAs. Wow. lot. One PMA is a lot, little on five. Right. And then what it brings is evidence that the position clinician can use to help guide the treatment for the patient. You know, real solid proof.

Because one of the things we learned when we went from Burns to trauma, so we've been in Burns a few years. We showed up at trauma and we said, hey, we've got this thing, spray on skin. It was like we were from Mars, you know, you know, so we needed the data. to help both the hospital administration and the trauma surgeons learn about them. That's a good segue. We probably won't have time to get through all of my questions, right? But I'd love to start there, right? Is you've got a wealth of experience, especially as it relates to commercial launches, right?

Across a broad sort of degree of categories as well. So when you think about like some of those key lessons that you're now incorporating in these launches at Aveda, what would they be? I mean, what are the one or two things that really kind of stand out that you're, you know, you're really implementing now that, you know, maybe you wish you knew, you know, 15, 20 years ago. Yeah. Well, I learned something new every day, I can I tell you, honestly. But one of them, you know, for example, is there's a business model that often accompanies first in category products.

And that is you team the sales rep up with specials. And Avita did that. And I've had quite a number of those models. and they all work the same, and we just passed through one of the phases. So phase one is you get incredible added value from a clinical specialist as a fundamental part of how you sell. And we did that. So we had about a two to one ratio, two reps had one kind of specialists.

So the numbers were like 58 and 29. What we just did on April 1st is we went to the place where there's a Clinton specials for a small number of accounts. So we went down to seven and we converted to a model where the rep has to be able to do all of the process of selling. So it has to do with the evolution and adoption by the clinicians. In our case, if you recall, there's a two-stage procedure. We didn't need to be in the first one. Now we need to be in the first one to make the, are we going to temporize with permary germ first? Then are we going to use a dermal matrix?

And then seven to ten days later, we're going to do resell and a skin wrap. And we're going to close it with hermary derm. The sales rep needs to be in that case the whole time. So now it's a stage of maturity of the technology and of the evolution of the product portfolio. So I knew it was going to come. And now we've done it. And we did it very, very deliberately. some of the clinical specialists are in essentially a sales role now. So we've changed the strategy a lot.

Another related example, for example, was commercializing SIMAD at the time in the early 90s in Japan and Europe. All of the medical device business that was innovative were in distributor-based businesses. And it's a similar profile, but it applied differently. is that everybody's distributor had inventory in country. Everybody's distributor sold multiple product lines from different companies and had a limited amount of technical expertise. When we went direct, we were the first medical device company to do central distribution next day, anywhere in Europe from one spot, which was Maastricht in the Netherlands. So we'd take the order in the country, ship it from Mastricht, end up in the hospital next morning.

So we didn't have inventory everywhere, and our reps were excessively technical, and so only our products. And so in Japan and Europe, suddenly, and the rate of innovation at that time was so high, we gained share so rapidly by being more specialized, more technical, involved in the case, and easy for customer, right? All those principles. And when we merged with Boston, we just grabbed their urology business and their endoscopy business, and they're in the rest. neural radiology business and blah you know xyz and we just made specialty sales forces out of them integrated into the infrastructure we created which the same thing we do here with we're focusing on the technical competence of our team that's everything here we utilize the MSL model also medical science liaison and their role is to get the physicians to do studies and the

get on the podium and cause research to happen, including that which we do not control. So that in its aggregate is a real important learning and not thought enough about by many. Hey there, it's Scott. And thanks for listening in so far. The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider Premium Members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. Here's why.

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