Endotronix Hires Seasoned Life Sciences Executive as CFO

Endotronix Inc., a medical technology company providing device and digital health solutions for heart failure management, today announced the appointment of seasoned life sciences executive and entrepreneur John Flavin as chief financial officer. He joins the team as the company prepares to scale business operations in preparation of clinical trials and commercialization of the Cordella Heart Failure (HF) System.
 
The Cordella System is a comprehensive HF management solution that extends care into the home by collecting and securely transmitting daily patient health data and insights to the clinician to guide treatment. The easy-to-use system is designed to create more time for patient care and strengthen the patient-clinician relationship. For patients with challenging disease management, the system includes a wireless, implantable pulmonary artery (PA) pressure sensor that enables proactive HF management.  PA pressure-guided HF management has demonstrated a mortality benefit and a reduction in HF-related hospitalizations.
 
The company implanted its first PA pressure sensor in a patient suffering from heart failure in Belgium in late 2017 and the Cordella System without the sensor has been in clinical use for over a year in the U.S.
 
“John has a rich background in life science technology commercialization, both from doing it directly in a hands-on operating role as well as creating an environment in which it can flourish,” said Harry Rowland, CEO and Co-founder of Endotronix. “His expertise will be a great asset as we prepare to commercialize the Cordella System later this year.”
 
Flavin most recently led the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Polsky Exchange start-up incubator and helped raise over $135 million in philanthropic and corporate funding to support technology development, start-ups, and commercialization. Prior to that he held president and CFO roles at Advanced Life Sciences and MediChem Life Sciences, where he oversaw corporate development and raised over $220 million in public and private capital, including two successful NASDAQ IPOs.
 
“I’ve spent much of my time at the University of Chicago fostering innovations that combine data science and healthcare because I truly believe the combination will have the most direct impact on improving outcomes for complex health conditions,” Flavin said. “The Endotronix solution is an excellent example of this and I’m thrilled to be joining the team as they enter a new phase.”
 
Flavin will continue to serve in an advisory role on an important, ongoing university project: The construction of a new innovation complex in downtown Hyde Park to house translational researchers from the university, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Army Research Laboratory.
 
Flavin is a board member at the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition, and he sits on Governor Bruce Rauner’s Illinois Innovation Council, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s ChicagoNEXT technology council, and the City of Chicago’s Small Business Advisory Committee.