This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube presentation titled "From Aerospace to Health | Evidation Health CEO Deb Kilpatrick" (recorded Feb 25, 2020) in which Deb Kilpatrick describes her career trajectory from aerospace R&D to bioengineering and medical device development. The speaker recounts work as a structural analyst on turbine blades at Pratt & Whitney, her PhD translation of aerospace computational methods to soft tissue, and later roles modeling vascular implants and drug‑eluting/bioabsorbable stents at companies including Guidant, Boston Scientific, and Abbott, while reflecting on product development and value creation in the U.S. healthcare ecosystem.
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But what I really wanted to do is I really wanted to be in medicine, and I really wanted to be in healthcare. And I had no idea how to do that because I knew I didn't want to be a doctor, and I knew I was really good at engineering, but what do engineers do in medicine? And that sounds like a crazy thing now because of course we all know that engineers have a big role to play in medicine. But back then, this is now 1991, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't so obvious. I've been really, really fortunate to observe some incredible technologies and products up close because I started my career as an R&D engineer in aerospace before I went into R&D as an engineer in healthcare. And so I'm going to walk you through a few of those product journeys and talk about my role on those because everything that I know and believe about creating value in an ecosystem, which by the way is the most important thing that we have to think about in the U.S. healthcare system today, I learned from these experiences. So let's go way, way back to the late 1980s. What was going on in the world, if you lived in the US, which I don't think any of you were probably born, is there was the Cold War, like the first Cold War, right? Soviet Union versus United States. And if you were a student in engineering at the major universities or big programs in the US, You probably went to work at a defense contractor. Why? Because that's where all the jobs were. You have to imagine that there was no tech sector, right? Imagine that the automotive sector and the defense sector were where we worked. And so, like many other students with my background, I had an undergraduate degree in engineering science and mechanics, which is about as theoretical as you can get as an undergraduate engineer. It's sort of like majoring in continuum mechanics. And so I became an expert in solid behavior and an expert in computational approaches to modeling solid behavior, and so I was recruited by Pratt Whitney. And as a 21-year-old, I was— suddenly found myself building computational models to run on one of 5 Cray supercomputers that were on the planet at the time. And if you're familiar with the history of supercomputing, you'll recognize that that picture in the middle is a Cray supercomputer. They're actually now kind of well known for being this amazing example of design versus function, because not really clear if it had to be designed that way to be functional, but it sure as hell looks cool. And so it's actually been a lot of architecture and design articles written about the Cray, for those of you who are fans of that sort of thing. And just to give you a sense of what we were doing, so I was a structural analyst, and my job was to make sure that The F-22 Raptor, when it was built, that the engine, uh, would be able to take that plane, uh, faster and higher than any other plane on the planet and be able to be a deterrent to combat, uh, in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And my role specifically in that was to make sure that these little parts didn't blow up and cause an explosion of the airplane. Um, does anybody know what that is? A rocket. That's a turbine blade. In fact, specifically, it's a high turbine blade. And the big difference between turbine blades and fan blades, and when you look into the, uh, if you're looking, if you're like getting on a plane and you're sort of looking at the engine inlet, you're looking at fan blades, and those are really big. Even in military jets, they're pretty big. Um, turbine blades are the workhorse of a gas turbine engine. They're deep within the heart of the, of the, uh, of the engine. And the high turbine, which is the workhorse of the turbine, is the first blade in a row of turbines that gets the turbo boost and gets the power and gets the thrust to the engine. To give you a sense of size, those things are about this big in a military aircraft. So you're getting a huge amount of power from very small amounts of metal. But because the heat and the speed and all of the dynamics associated with resonance and aeroelasticity are going on in that particular part, in that particular part of the engine, if it breaks, the thing blows up, right? And so my job was to figure out, work in a team, and figure out how to build what at the time were really state-of-the-art computational models of what those parts would experience in the Raptor at, at flight, different flight conditions. Um, I was 21 years old. I had no idea the scope of what I was actually working on. Um, but I really, really liked it. I was really good at computation. I was really good at analysis. Um, and this would become really incredibly important to how I viewed R&D and product development, you know, through my career. But what I really wanted to do is I really wanted to be in medicine, and I really wanted to be in healthcare. And I had no idea how to do that because I knew I didn't want to be a doctor, and I knew I was really good at engineering, but what do engineers do in medicine? And that sounds like a crazy thing now because of course we all know that engineers have a big role to play in medicine. But back then, this is now 1991, you know, it wasn't so obvious. And so what I did is I went back to grad school and was at one of the original 5 funded major bioengineering programs in the country at Georgia Tech. So I just had to go back to Georgia Tech. I did my PhD in mechanical engineering with a focus in bioengineering, and what I did is I basically took all the work that I had done in aerospace and figured out a way to translate that into soft tissue. So multiphase materials, which follow the laws of physics in an airplane, are the same kinds of— you can use the same kind of approaches in the body for soft tissue in multiphase solid problems, use the same kind of computational approaches, but nobody had done that yet. And so that was my PhD. When I got out, I wanted to go into healthcare, and I wanted to go into medical devices. And so I landed here in Silicon Valley. Now we're in— it's about 1996. Late 1996. And at the time, there was a very, very big push to understand actual loads on devices as they were implanted in the body and to understand how you could really push the envelope by modeling those conditions more accurately and being able to model implant behavior in the same way on the computer as you would experience it historically in, in vivo. Sound familiar? Yeah. So I was basically doing a very similar thing in modeling implants and vascular stents as I had been doing in aerospace, only now I'm operating at really, really tiny scale. So these devices are about 3 millimeters in diameter. And at the time, there was a true huge push to use all the geography you could to deliver drug. And nobody had developed these quite yet, but we were certainly moving fast and furiously as an industry Between Johnson Johnson, Guidant, and Boston Scientific were the 3 companies that were sort of chasing that. The division of Guidant that I was involved with was here in Santa Clara. It's now Abbott Vascular. I'll get to that in a minute. Down off the 101, as you almost are going to San Jose. And my job was to help figure out— what you're looking at in the middle is an angiogram, an X-ray angiogram of the coronary tree in a beating heart. And my job was to help figure out how you could design not only metal implants, but design bioabsorbable material implants and have them not break. Again, very similar job to what I had done in aerospace. And about that time, we were acquired for $36 billion— sorry, for $26 billion. At the time, it was the largest medical device acquisition in history. It's still the top 3, second only to Medtronic's acquisition of Covidien a few years ago. And we were acquired by Boston Scientific, and we were immediately— my division was immediately sold to Abbott. Now you might know Abbott as a really large pharma company now known as AbbVie. At the time it was all one pharma company and they were starting a device branch. And when we were acquired by them, one of the two— well, two of the most important products that they They wanted as part of the acquisition was a product called Ziance V, which is there on the, on the left in the box on the left on the right, which was a drug-eluting coronary stent system that eluted a product called everolimus, and the Absorb bioabsorbable vascular scaffold, which for those of you who might be experts or understand biomaterials, bioabsorbable materials literally over time they resorb into the tissue. So yes. Can you repeat the name of the product? It's kind of like a disappearing implant. And so the journey of how we did all this as a company, there are a lot of Harvard Business studies, Harvard Case Reviews written about it, business cases written about it, because we had to go from an electromechanical device company to a drug delivery company. It's not easy to do, and in fact, there's a lot of argument that the reason we were acquired is because we had such a hard time doing it that we really got beaten up in the market Johnson Johnson, who was both a pharmaceutical company and a device company. And so they beat us to the market. We had a lot of problems with our stock price around that time, and, and we were acquired. So,
