Professor Shlomo Ben-Haim is known for his modesty, and is notoriously media shy. Nonethleless, a biomed conference set up financier and philanthropist Michael Milken's Milken Institute and by President Shimon Peres was an opportunity for Israel's biotech and financial communities to publicly hear his views on the industry.
"The medical field is one of the most fascinating ones. I am excited by the power that comes from this industry in Israel", began Ben-Haim. "Nonetheless, in the past 20 years I have seen the industry move. It is much harder today to bring a medical device to market than in the past. Regulation is stricter, there are changes in intellectual property laws, and the process for insurance reimbursement has become longer and more complicated. If I once was able to bring a new medical device to the sales stage for $20 million, today it could cost at least $100 million. The same process has occurred with drugs, and it forces the industry to relate to the issues from a financial perspective."
"One of the tools, as they say in Mike's group (Michael Milken G.W.), is to spread the risk. One way is to group companies together. It is not as easy to do that in a place, like Israel, where projects fairly quickly become small private companies. Still, I am sure it will happen."
"Another possibility is to turn to new markets. The US market has become more difficult, and at the same time, the dollar is not what it once was. There is an opportunity to market new products especially to developing countries, when the intention is to develop solutions that will be cheaper and more accessible to those giant populations who earn less than $2 per person per day. Those people rarely receive proper medical treatment. In India, new and impressive hospitals are being built quickly, but only about 10% of Indians reach them. The gap can be partially made up through appropriate products."
Professor Ben-Haim worked early in his career as a scientist. He was a doctor and professor of cardiology at the Technion, where he developed one of the first stents in the world and co-founded InStent, which was bought by Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) in 1996 for $200 million. Ben-Haim was then able to fund both his own ideas and others'. Today he manages his investments through Hobart Holdings Ltd.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 6, 2007
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