On September 28, 2022, AVITA Medical, Inc. appointed Jim Corbett as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Corbett, who has served as a non-executive member of the Board of Directors, will continue as an executive member of the Board of Directors of AVITA Medical, Inc. James ‘Jim’ Corbett is a career life sciences executive, and he brings over 30 years of experience building and running commercial-stage healthcare business, including serving as CEO of three publicly traded companies.
Jim began his management career as part of American Hospital Supply Corporation (AHSC) in the Edwards organization. During this tenure at AHSC the Company was acquired by Baxter Healthcare and Jim was assigned to the role of General Manager, Baxter Japan based in Tokyo, Japan. During his time in Tokyo, he grew operating earnings from 2.5x annually over three years.
Upon completing his successful expatriate assignment, Jim accepted the role of General Manager/President of SciMed International, where he was recruited to build the international business. SciMed was acquired by Boston Scientific only a few years into Jim's tenure. Over the nearly eight years that Jim led the International business, he spearheaded the division's expansion from a sub $100M distributor-based business into a $l billion in revenue thriving, global operation, with direct selling in all major markets, across all business units, with international manufacturing and research and development centers in Europe and Asia. That expansion resulted in 50% or greater quarter-over-quarter revenue growth throughout Jim’s tenure. Jim’s experiences at Baxter and Boston Scientific provided an invaluable lesson:
"Big companies can't operate without being excellent at what they do, and if they're not excellent, they are not successful. What really became clear to me while working for these large organizations is that you must develop people and the team. That has become a big focus for me because you have to prepare people and hire them with the potential of doing the job it's going to be, not the job that it is today. And you must coach them along the way. Companies really start achieving when they identify the leaders of tomorrow and start putting them on assignments today that prepare them for tomorrow."
Jim's experience developing the right market fit and strategy for medical devices led him to accept the CEO position at Home Diagnostics (now Trividia Health), whose flagship product was an early-stage glucose monitoring system. This was a highly competitive market, with industry giants J&J, Roche, and Abbott Labs all competing for shelf space. While at Home Diagnostics, Jim pioneered the first "store brand" device of its kind into the retail pharmacy market, a segment that now does nearly $900M in annual revenue today and dominates the space.
"The problem we were solving there was, how do we grow this company in a competitive market against industry giants? And what we found was that the distribution channel was the killer app. So we created the co-brand with the pharmacy chains and that became part of our marketing strategy."
In 2001, Jim partnered with the private equity firm Warburg Pincus to create and build a new endovascular company, ev3. Over the next eight years, ev3 grew to nearly $450 million in annual revenue after starting with less than $10M in 2002. In 2005, Jim led a successful IPO for ev3, eventually achieving a market cap of $2 billion during his tenure. Jim credits his experience and learnings from the past as instrumental in the success of ev3.
Throughout Jim's career, he has served as CEO of three publicly traded companies: MTIX (Microtherapeutics), ev3, and Alphatec Spine. He has held the CEO position at numerous other privately venture-backed companies, including HDI, Vertos Medical, and CathWorks LTD. Jim has also raised significant capital, including public markets (IPO, secondary offerings, PIPE), debt financing, and private equity, and has successfully closed multiple venture financings as a CEO. Jim is now looking to apply all these learnings and experience to drive revenue and growth at AVITA Medical.
"AVITA Medical has a terrific team. My focus for the AVITA Medical team is to develop the ‘esprit de corps’ around growing the company in a way that serves more people, serves more patients, and builds value for shareholders. We can really spread our wings with burns and soft tissue because we'll be covering almost 400 level one and two trauma centers, which includes a significant overlap among many of the core burn centers we already call upon. While we focus on driving growth in burns and soft tissue, we have a tremendous opportunity to expand use of the device into vitiligo and the dermatology market.
We have the core technology, and these are large markets. What will be the real enabler for us is feet on the street. Having the customer understand the advantages of RECELL, the experience of tissue sparing, more rapid healing, better outcomes for the patient. That is the killer app for AVITA Medical, and I'm confident that we are going to succeed."
