InterValve, a medical device company in Minnetonka, Minnesota, is looking to close its series A round of funding soon in order to advance its proprietary aortic valvuloplasty balloon to clinical trials later this year.CEO Mark Ungs said the company hopes to begin testing its transcatheter aortic valve device in humans this year and submit it [...]

UnitedHealthcare Group’s OptumRx division is developing a mobile health app that will help its members manage their prescriptions and medications more effectively using smartphones.OptumRx works with employers who use the company as a prescription benefits management service. Currently, OptumRx has 13 million members. When the app launches, it will be available to those members and [...]

Hospital infection is a stubborn and costly reality with nearly 500,000 surgical site infections (SSIs) occurring annually, according to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention.Now Minnesota conglomerate 3M has issued a call-to-action by publishing a white paper in which experts exhort hospitals to use a collaborative approach to deal with the intractable problem and [...]

Mayo Clinic‘s decision to build two costly proton beam cancer treatment centers is contributing to America’s medical arms race and is “exhibit A” of “what is wrong with American healthcare today,” according to a New York Times editorial by two prominent healthcare thought leaders.The problem with proton therapy is simple, according to the editorial: It’s [...]

Uromedica, which develops urinary incontinence treatments, will find out in as soon as a few weeks if its medical device for men is ready for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval application.The Minnesota medical device company submitted fresh data to the FDA that, if accepted, would be the basis for a premarket approval (PMA) application, CEO Tim Cook said. Uromedica sent the data, which included a clinical analysis of more than 120 men, to the FDA in November. The company hopes to hear back from the agency by the end of January.

Minnesota — the land of a thousand lakes and nearly as many struggling life sciences incubators — has a new early stage facilitator that’s getting its sea legs. The Sister Kenny Research Institute has spent the last few years developing an incubator that leverages its mix of clinicians, innovators, graduate students and a tiny bit [...]

In a $120 million (and growing) market saturated with thousands of products, a company that creates medical mobile apps has to do something to make itself stand out.Preventice, a health IT company based in Rochester, Minnesota, thinks it has a winning formula.Preventice Inc. (formerly Boost Information Systems) develops mobile to cloud-based health technologies for smartphones [...]

Three diabetes-related research projects at Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota received more than $1.8 million through a state-funded research initiative for preventing, treating and curing diabetes.Decade of Discovery is an initiative of the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics, a collaboration between the university, the clinic and the state of Minnesota. It [...]

The U.S. attorney in Minneapolis settled a kickback case with device maker Medtronic yesterday, with the company agreeing to pay $23.5 million without admitting it paid doctors $1,000 to $2,000 for choosing its brand of defibrillator. What is so galling about this and other cases like it is that the physicians were being asked to [...]

Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) will shell out $23.5 million to settle accusations that it paid kickbacks to doctors who implanted its pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators, the company announced Monday.Medtronic was accused of soliciting physicians to participate in post-market studies and device registries, offering them between $1,000 and $2,000 per patient for using Medtronic’s device, according to the [...]