The Value of Scientific Publications in Surgical Device Innovation

Clinical trials represent a significant risk in the commercialization of surgical technologies. There is incentive for companies to mitigate their regulatory risk by targeting 510K over Premarket Approval (PMA) pathways in order to limit the scope, complexity and cost of clinical trials. As such, not all companies will publish clinical data in the scientific literature. We set out to investigate the relationship between scientific publication by surgical device companies and the impact it has on company valuation. We hypothesize that publishing in the scientific literature correlates with success of the surgical device companies as measured by funding. We first obtained a list of surgical device startup companies and their financial deals using the Pitchbook database. Those companies were then cross referenced with the FDA database and the Dimensions database for product registrations and peer reviewed publications, respectively. Analysis was then performed using these query results. We obtained a list of US surgical device startups financing deals closed between 2010 and 2020 from the Pitchbook database. We queried the Pitchbook for deal dates from January 1, 2010 to January 1, 2020 for deal types spanning early stage investment to IPO. Deals were limited to those conducted in the United States and to the surgical device industry. We queried the FDA database for product registration information associated with each of the companies involved in the deals. We tabulated the number of journal articles associated with surgical device companies using the Dimensions Search API as well as a manual confirmation. Five hundred thirty five (535) deals from 222 companies were found in Pitchbook that met our criteria. Querying the FDA database resulted in 578 registrations associated with these companies. Publications per company ranged widely. Companies that are able to generate a more numerous publications had correspondingly higher valuations during funding rounds. A subset of outstanding companies were analyzed and at least four factors affect: direct value of publications, indirect valve of publications, survivorship bias, and adoption share; each of which will be discussed in this manuscript.