Guided Therapy Systems CEO Michael Slayton, PhD, has a history of breaking innovative medical technology, with a primary focus on diagnostic and therapeutic ultrasound applications. He tells In Vivo about the 22-year engineering journey that has led him and the company he founded to the cusp of market launch of a non-invasive tissue regeneration device for musculoskeletal injuries.

A preview of the emerging health care companies profiled in the current issue of Start-Up. This month's profile group: Do-It-Yourself Dermatology, features profiles of Therative and Xthetix. Plus these Start-Ups Across Health Care: iCardiac Technologies, Jenken Biosciences, Neovasc Medical, and Syntaxin.

The past couple of years have witnessed the formation of more than a dozen companies focused on taking a portfolio of very early stage medical devices to the next level. With good ideas and connections, device industry executives, as an alternative to joining operating companies are increasingly joining incubators where they can keep their hands in device company creation over a number of projects. Whether you call these companies incubators or accelerators, they all share the goal of filling a gap between technology and company creation, and funding. Accelerators can help early stage concepts get the hearing they normally might not get either in the venture capital community, which is prepared to take on clinical and market risk but not technological risk, or large companies, which are focused on maintaining existing businesses. In fact, for certain kinds of broadly-enabling platform technologies that cut across clinical specialties, the incubator/accelerator model makes a lot of sense.

Xthetix is developing a handheld, high-frequency ultrasound device for the up-and-coming consumer aesthetic device market, leading with a product for treating and preventing acne. By heating skin tissue at a desired target depth without heating the skin's surface, its device can quickly treat existing pimples. Since it can also deposit heat directly into the sebaceous glands and hair follicles, it can inhibit the formation of sebum and thus prevent mild to moderate acne from erupting.