EndoChoice Brand Guidelines: The 2008 Georgia GI Company Behind Fuse, Now Boston Scientific

A company built for the gastroenterologist.

EndoChoice was founded in 2008 and based in the Atlanta, Georgia area, in Alpharetta. Its founder and chief executive was Mark Gilreath, who is named in that role in the 2016 announcement of the company’s sale. The company was built around one medical speciality: gastroenterology, the diagnosis and treatment of conditions of the digestive tract.

Its origins were in marketing rather than in a laboratory. Globes reported in September 2016 that Gilreath, previously vice-president of marketing at Given Imaging, founded EndoChoice with a team of endoscope marketing specialists. The paper described the founding idea as a gastrointestinal company that would develop and sell a broad range of improved devices adapted to what doctors needed, and said that because the colonoscope is among the most important tools for such doctors, the company went looking for one of its own.

Rather than a single device, EndoChoice offered a catalogue. Its own description in 2015 was of a medtech company focused on the manufacturing and commercialisation of endoscopic imaging systems, devices, infection control products and pathology services for specialists in the gastrointestinal field. When the Israeli business paper Globes reported its stock-market debut in June 2015, it described the company as founded in the United States and holding a portfolio of hundreds of products designed for gastroenterologists.

The everyday part of that catalogue was single-use equipment. Boston Scientific’s announcement of September 2016 lists resection and retrieval devices, needles, graspers and infection control kits among EndoChoice’s single-use products, alongside its pathology services and its imaging technologies. In 2015 EndoChoice said its direct sales organisation served more than 2,500 customers in the country, and worked with distribution partners abroad.

An Israeli start-up and a wide-angle colonoscope.

In January 2013 EndoChoice merged with Peer Medical, an Israeli endoscopy start-up. Globes reported the deal on 6 January 2013: EndoChoice would market the products, while Peer Medical would continue as the Israeli research and development centre for both companies and help develop EndoChoice products. Peer Medical had developed an endoscope for examining the bowel that, the paper wrote, provides a broader image than a conventional colonoscope. The two companies did not disclose the relative shares of the merger.

The Israeli side stayed in Israel. In September 2016 Globes reported that EndoChoice had about 60 employees at its development centre in Caesarea, Israel, and summed the company up as the result of a merger between an American marketing company and Israeli technology.

That endoscope became the Fuse system — short for Full Spectrum Endoscopy. EndoChoice registered both names as trademarks, and its 2015 offering announcement described the Full Spectrum Endoscopy System as part of a broad product portfolio. By the time of the listing, Globes wrote, the colonoscope developed by Peer Medical was the company’s growth engine, and the paper called EndoChoice a US-Israeli medical equipment company.

Globes gave the scope’s distinguishing feature as its field of view: it reported in 2016 that the Full Spectrum Endoscope could transmit a 330-degree field of vision, compared with 170 degrees for existing endoscopes.

The listing came in June 2015. EndoChoice announced the pricing of its initial public offering on 4 June 2015, and its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange the next day under the symbol “GI”. J.P. Morgan and BofA Merrill Lynch led the offering, the company said.

How the category presents itself.

Endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery are sold to a small, expert audience: surgeons, gastroenterologists, theatre nurses and the hospital teams who buy and reprocess equipment. The makers’ public image follows from that. A familiar picture in this field is the instrument itself, a slim scope coiled on a white ground or a rigid telescope laid out at full length, shown with little else around it, so that the length, the bend and the tip carry the image.

The second familiar picture is the operating theatre. Here the product is the system rather than the single instrument: a video tower of camera units and light sources beside the table, and a team of surgeons looking up at a screen rather than down at the patient. Some makers go a step further and present the whole room; Karl Storz, for example, showed its OR1 integrated operating room at the Medica trade fair in 1998, the company says. Close by sit macro shots of instrument tips, clips and jaws, where the detail is the subject.

Much of the communication happens face to face. Makers run training and visitor centres where clinicians handle equipment and practise techniques; Karl Storz says it opened a logistics and training centre in Tuttlingen in 1999. Congresses matter as much: Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in the United States, UEG Week in Europe and the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) are where new scopes, generators and accessories are shown to the people who will use them.

The makers in this guide range from long-established German firms to younger companies elsewhere, and from full endoscope systems to single devices. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, and it marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Absorbed into Boston Scientific in 2016.

EndoChoice did not stay independent for long after its listing. On 27 September 2016 Boston Scientific and EndoChoice Holdings announced a definitive agreement under which Boston Scientific would buy the company through a tender offer for all of its shares. Boston Scientific announced the close of the acquisition on 22 November 2016, and EndoChoice became part of the Boston Scientific Endoscopy business. In its closing announcement Boston Scientific described EndoChoice as an Alpharetta, Georgia company focused on infection control products, pathology services and single-use devices for gastrointestinal specialists.

The Fuse colonoscope was treated separately. When the deal was announced, Boston Scientific said it intended to evaluate strategic options for the Fuse platform and expected to give more clarity around the time of closing; at closing it said it was still evaluating those options and expected to give an update on its plans by the end of 2016. Globes, reporting the agreement, wrote that EndoChoice had not sold its products as quickly as the market had expected, while adding that it was not a commercial failure, and that the outcome of Boston Scientific’s assessment would decide the future of the Israeli development centre. EndoChoice therefore no longer trades as an independent company: since November 2016 its products and services have been part of Boston Scientific’s endoscopy business.

For a design guide, EndoChoice shows how a young company built around one speciality can grow by merger and listing, and then be absorbed into a larger group. Compare Boston Scientific, which bought the company, and Olympus, another maker of colonoscopes. For this guide we use a navy, a pale slate and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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