VILLE-PEKKA SEPPÄ 
Revenio Research Ltd., Vantaa, Finland

Turning academic research to medical device business

There is vast amount of academic research in technologies that are or could be targeted to healthcare. To realize the societal and business potential of such research it needs eventually to be transformed into a medical device product. Even though there are success stories even larger number of such attempts fail due to numerous pitfalls on the way. When a medical device startup is founded by an academic group it is important to gain basic understanding on financing, product development, regulation, marketing, and many more topics that are usually almost unknown to researchers.

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Ville-Pekka Seppä is currently working as an R&D Manager at a Finnish medical device company Revenio Group. Since starting in the company in 2015, his main responsibility has been R&D for Revenio’s Ventica® system (CE Class IIa medical device) but he has also been involved in design, analysis and publication of clinical studies, product marketing and direct contact with key opinion leaders, customers and distributors. In 2014 he founded a startup company to commercialize the Ventica technology and in 2015 a license deal was made with Revenio.
Seppä is the original inventor of the Ventica® technology which he developed as a doctorate student at Tampere University, Finland. He received his D.Sc.(tech.) degree in biomedical engineering with honours in 2014. During 2007-2008 he worked as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, USA.
He has authored over 30 peer-reviewed scientific articles (h-index 11) and holds more than 20 patents.