Our Mission | The Pursuit of Perfection
Our respect for the patient is expressed in our relentless pursuit of perfection and our lifetime commitment to improve medical devices. Developing fundamental enabling technology is neither easy or convenient, but we believe, is the only path to true innovation.
Leadership Team
Christian Gastón Palmaz
President & CEO
“Thirty years of intravascular device development have yielded ingenious iterations of the original balloon expandable stent. However, its basic technology remains fundamentally unchanged. The reliance on foundry-sourced materials, reductive manufacturing and extensive hand labor makes it impossible to go beyond certain miniaturization limits and maintain tight dimensional and functional tolerances. The inherent limitations become evident when devices made with traditional technologies are pushed into extreme engineering requirements. Examples of such requirements are found in new structural cardiac applications, lower extremity venous valves, eye surgery, brain-computer interfacing and many other critical applications.
At Vactronix we have developed powerful technologies based on additive atomic buildup (bottom-up manufacturing) to replace the traditional top-down or reductive manufacturing. This approach allows to advance bio-mechanical performance to new levels, and to control design and tolerances to sub-micron scale. These objectives are possible by replacing current conventional wrought alloys by high energy PVD synthetic materials. By controlling point-to-point heterogeneity in the material and its structural arrangement is it possible to engineer bulk structure and surface features to sub-microscopic levels. These capabilities allow superior devices with high performance properties. In our laboratories, sophisticated new alloys and materials engineering have pushed performance to unprecedented new levels and have enabled the creation of design geometries not possible using traditional means.” - Christian Palmaz
Julio Palmaz MD
Chief Scientific Advisor
“Personal experience in revolutionizing health care at its foundations gives us the proper perspective to do it again. The introduction of the balloon-expandable vascular stent in the early 1980’s ushered a new era in vascular therapy and led the way into replacing open surgery with minimally invasive techniques. Perceived originally as a crazy idea, the eventual acceptance of the stent was largely due to hard work, ingenuity and tenacity. After achieving wide recognition, we never thought that the job was completed or that all new frontiers had been explored. The field of intravascular implants took many turns driven by empirical assumptions and marketing motivations. In my view, the frantic development of the vascular stent neglected its most important attributes: Its surface characteristics and its constituent materials. The first attribute aims to optimize material-host interaction at molecular level and the second seeks to expand the biomechanical properties to levels higher than achieved by currently used materials” - Dr. Julio Palmaz
Scott Carpenter
Senior Director of R&D
Scott’s background in mechanical engineering and material science engineering from UC Berkeley began his career in Nitinol starting in 1985. Scott joined Raychem in 1988, where his first projects were in aerospace avionics connectors that involved Nitinol and a variety of other high-tech materials. In 1992, Scott transitioned to Raychem’s newly-formed medical group, developing Nitinol-based products for US Surgical, many of which are still marketed. In 1996, Memry purchased the Raychem Medical group. At Memry, Scott helped to develop the company’s Nitinol soft core and hybrid tubing line. Later Scott headed the Advanced Development R&D group, working with scores of companies developing prototype and production devices, primarily in the medical field. Scott moved to Nitinol Devices and Components in 2005, where he developed retrievable IVC filters and motion preserving orthopedic implant devices. In 2010, Scott joined Palmaz Scientific where he directed and participated in the efforts in Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) and PVD-based device and process development. Palmaz Scientific restructured in 2015 and reemerged as Vactronix Scientific. Today, Scott is the Senior Director of Product Development at Vactronix with similar duties to those held at Palmaz Scientific.