Congratulations on your new role Jimmy! How come you have now joined CLS as the company´s EVP Operations?

Well, there are several reasons, one is definitely the good team spirit. I am continuously learning a lot by working in the CLS team. We also have close and fruitful collaborations with our distributors and suppliers. Our subsidiaries and commercial partners do a great job in their respective fields. So, I think CLS is a good mix of people and knowledge that makes going to work fun.

Another reason is that it’s really motivating that our Thermoguide™ Workstation is now cleared by the FDA and used by several clinics in the US supporting patient cases in neurosurgery. It’s exciting to hear how satisfied clinicians and doctors are with Thermoguide´s performance – seeing them work with our products and receiving positive feedback are very motivating!

I took the chance to join CLS in this role as well for the opportunity to influence what we do and how we do it. I know the team quite well by now, we are experts in various fields and have a very deep understanding of each phase of the product life cycles. So together we can solve almost every kind of challenge that comes when we develop and introduce new medical products to the market.

So, before being appointed EVP Operations, you were the project manager for the Thermoguide design and development project. Can you tell us more about the background?

We developed Thermoguide to meet the tough requirements of high precision when treating patients with laser ablation. The key is to ablate (remove) the amount of tissue required for a successful treatment, not too much and not too little, this demands precise control of the ablation process. This is an absolute must, especially during neurosurgical procedures, where you need to be very precise.

Thermoguide is now used both for prostate cancer treatments and in neurosurgery. What are the main advantages of Thermoguide?

Since laser ablation treatments are performed in a very complex environment, the major focus was on safety aspects during the development of Thermoguide. During a laser ablation procedure, Thermoguide software receives information from an MRI scanner to calculate and map tissue temperature and estimated tissue damage. The software also interacts with our Mobile Laser Unit which controls the laser output power and treatment duration. In this way, several complex products are linked together, which allows the physician to tailor the treatment for each specific patient.

It was challenging to design the software so that all these systems can work together in a safe and effective way, but we are proud of the result and the built-in safety features. For example, if the MRI scanner stops sending information to Thermoguide, the laser unit will automatically shut down the output power which stops the ablation process.

In neurosurgery, Thermoguide is an integral part of the Therapy System which is used not only for tumor ablation but also to treat epilepsy. What are the experiences so far?

CLS started as a cancer and tumor company when it was founded, but as new market opportunities have surfaced over the years and we have gained more and more knowledge, we now see further areas of application for our technology platform.

Our products are now also used for treating drug-resistant epilepsy as well as deep depression. Both areas are very interesting and come with even higher demands on safety and precision. Looking at these patient groups, it is mainly young patients with, for example, severe epilepsy who do not respond to drugs.