Sean Salmon: It sounds like you've been on the ride for almost as long as I have. The first investment we made in that startup company, Ardian, was in 2009.

And we've been through this, what we called the original trials and then the 'reboot' of it all, where we took a lot of precautions. It is hard to study something that the patient can measure themselves at home [like blood pressure].

They can go into their medicine cabinet and do something about it. It is really hard to do trials in the presence of medications. I guess that is the short story.

But we learned a bunch of things, including that it is important to be able to prove whether you have drug metabolites in patients – yes or no – and to know which ones they took. That wasn't the case in the first studies and that was among the things we changed.

We also changed the patient population, the site of ablation, and we changed the catheter design. We changed a bunch of things, but what you can't change is prescriber and patient behavior, per se, so it was pretty clear and understandable where the challenges were.

That conversation was going on way before and will go on way after that meeting.

'There Is Work To Do:' Sean Salmon Discusses Medtronic's Recent Hard-Won Cardio Breakthroughs

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