New companies in emerging markets are fond of saying that they're operating in a field that's like interventional cardiology was, say, 10 or 15 years ago. That's when minimally invasive diagnostic procedures paved the way for minimally invasive device interventions, some of which are now billion dollar markets. Although it's a cliché, the comparison really does ring true for interventional pulmonology, where 6,000 bronchoscopists have long had the tools for the minimally invasive diagnosis of life-threatening disorders, but no therapeutic tools to go along with them.
Ten years ago, the earliest interventional pulmonology companies sprang up; first came Pulmonx Inc. , followed by Broncus Technologies Inc. , Spiration Inc. and Emphasys Medical Inc. These companies saw an opportunity to develop bronchoscopic treatments for emphysema, in the shadow of the National Emphysema Treatment Trial (NETT). NETT was a more than 1,200-patient, five-year, randomized prospective trial sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in collaboration with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to determine which, if any, emphysema patients truly benefited from lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS)
