Corindus Brand Guidelines: The CorPath Robot Maker That Became Siemens Healthineers

A cardiologist, a graduate and a university incubator.

Corindus began in Israel, around the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Its founder was Rafael Beyar, an interventional cardiologist. A Technion article from July 2012 says he founded the company in 2000, at a time when he was general director of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, and that its first chief executive was the Technion graduate Tal Wenderow, who had run it since it was based in the Technion’s incubator. English Wikipedia gives the founding year as 2002 and names Wenderow, Beyar’s student at the Technion, as co-founder; the two sources differ on the year.

The idea, as English Wikipedia describes it, was to use remote control and robotics to move coronary guidewires and balloon or stent catheters, the fine devices that cardiologists thread through the arteries to reach a narrowed heart vessel. In a conventional procedure those devices are pushed and turned by hand at the patient’s side. Corindus set out to let the operator do the same work from an “interventional cockpit,” in English Wikipedia’s phrase, set apart from the table.

The company did not stay in Israel. By 2012, the Technion wrote, it operated in Massachusetts and was mainly run by a US team; its press release that July was datelined Natick, and English Wikipedia places its later headquarters in Waltham, near Boston. Its full name, Corindus Vascular Robotics, spelled out the field it meant to work in. English Wikipedia says the company went public in August 2014, with its shares listed in New York under the ticker CVRS, and that it went on to gain further clearances from the US Food and Drug Administration.

CorPath 200 and CorPath GRX.

The product carried one name throughout: CorPath. On 25 July 2012 Corindus announced that the US Food and Drug Administration had granted 510(k) clearance to the CorPath 200 System for use in percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI, the procedure that reopens narrowed coronary arteries with balloons and stents; the Technion republished the announcement two days later. English Wikipedia describes the CorPath as the first medical device to let interventionalists manipulate guidewires and balloons or stents from such a cockpit. When the company was sold in 2019, the joint release, as reported by Healio, said Corindus made the only FDA-cleared and CE-marked robotic systems for endovascular coronary and peripheral interventions, and that the systems let the operator stand away from the angiography table.

The later model was the CorPath GRX. Medical Design & Sourcing, a trade publication for the device industry, described it as the system behind the business’s endovascular work, and in September 2022 reported that Corindus had presented a study of a CorPath GRX neurovascular system, used in treating aneurysms in the brain, at the congress of the European Society of Minimally Invasive Neurological Therapy in Nice. That turn toward the blood vessels of the brain would later set the direction of the whole programme.

Remote operation was the other theme. The systems could also be operated from a remote site, Healio reported in October 2019, citing a case report published that September in EClinicalMedicine, a journal from The Lancet, which described coronary procedures performed from a remote location. When the business opened a larger building in 2022, Medical Design & Sourcing noted that it included a dedicated laboratory for remote robotic research and development, alongside a model shop for faster prototype machining.

Surgical robotics and its record.

Surgical robotics companies sell machines that most people will never see in use, so their public image is built from a small set of scenes. The commonest is the operating theatre itself: robot arms draped and angled over a table, a console set a few steps away, and a surgical team in scrubs around them. When the BBC reported a new British surgical robot in 2018, one of its pictures showed a surgeon steering a robot from a console.

The second scene is the surgeon’s own view. Many systems give the surgeon a 3D screen or viewer and hand controls, and company photographs often show a surgeon leaning into that viewer or working the controls, sometimes beside a screen showing the magnified view inside the body. Close-ups of instruments follow: slim shafts, small jaws and wristed tips that bend and turn, shown at a scale no visitor to a hospital would normally see.

Clean product renders do much of the remaining work. Arms, carts and consoles are shown against plain white or soft grey grounds, with a restrained palette of whites, greys and a single brand colour, so that the machine reads as precise and calm. Museums have started to collect the results; in 2023 the Science Museum in London put a surgical robot arm on show in its Engineers gallery.

The industry meets at its own congresses. In North America, the annual meeting of SAGES, the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, is a regular venue for new systems; in Europe there is the annual congress of the EAES, the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery; and in London the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics brings engineers and surgeons together. The companies in this guide range from established makers to closed ventures, and each guide sets out what can be checked about them.

From Corindus to Siemens Healthineers Endovascular Robotics.

In August 2019 Siemens Healthineers, the listed medical-technology arm of Siemens, announced that it would buy Corindus. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reporting the offer on 8 August, described Corindus as the developer of one of the first robot-assisted systems for minimally invasive vascular operations, and called the purchase Siemens Healthineers’ first large acquisition since its stock-market listing a year and a half earlier. The deal closed in October 2019: Healio reported on 29 October that the purchase was complete and that Mark Toland, Corindus’s president and chief executive, would continue to run the business inside Siemens Healthineers.

The business kept its own name for three more years. In April 2022 it moved from Waltham to a larger headquarters in Newton, Massachusetts, which Medical Design & Sourcing reported had more than twice the floor space of the old one, a production area three times the size and a role as the global centre of excellence for Siemens Healthineers’ endovascular robotics, covering development and manufacturing. Then, in December 2022, the Corindus name was retired: the business became Siemens Healthineers Endovascular Robotics, a change the company called “the final step” of the integration that had begun in 2019, the same publication reported.

In May 2023 Siemens Healthineers said it would stop using the Corindus robots for cardiology. On the company’s earnings call, first reported by Reuters and summarised by Medical Design & Sourcing on 10 May 2023, chief financial officer Jochen Schmitz said their use in cardiology “did not fulfill our expectations,” and that a robot for neurological procedures was several years from market. Today Siemens Healthineers’ US website presents endovascular robotics as a development programme focused on neurovascular care, built around a purpose-built next-generation robotic platform connected to imaging, and states that the products it describes are under development and not commercially available. Corindus no longer exists as a separate company or brand.

For a design guide, Corindus shows how a specialist name can be folded into its owner’s master brand within a few years of a takeover. Compare Medtronic, another medical-technology name, and Intuitive, the surgical-robot maker. For this guide we use a deep navy, a steel blue and a pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Corindus’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.