Episode 19: Dr. Lishan Aklog, Chairman and CEO at PAVmed Inc.

Dr. Aklog is an adult heart surgeon/entrepreneur and Chairman & CEO of PAVmed Inc. (Nasdaq: PAVM), a multi-product medical device company which he co-founded based in 2014 on a portfolio of five of his own inventions. He previously co-founded Pavilion Holdings Group LLC which created four medical device companies including venture-backed Vortex Medical which developed and commercialized his life- saving invention AngioVac® and was sold in 2012 to Angiodynamics (Nasdaq: ANGO).

Dr. Aklog received his AB from Harvard College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in Physics and his MD, cum laude, from Harvard Medical School. He completed his general and cardiothoracic surgical training along with a laboratory research fellowship under Dr. Lawrence H. Cohn at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, serving as Chief Resident in Cardiac Surgery at both institutions.

Throughout his career Dr. Aklog has been deeply involved in medical device innovation, serving on the advisory boards of many leading medical device companies, including Guidant, Medtronic, St. Jude Medical, and startups. This led to his evolution into an entrepreneur as a founding partner of Pavilion Holdings Group (PHG). Dr. Aklog holds 13 issued patents and several dozens pending patent applications. In 2014, Dr. Aklog co-founded PAVmed Inc. and has served as Chairman and CEO since its inception. PAVmed was built on a proven business model, honed at the PHG companies, focusing on capital efficiency and speed to market. He is also the lead inventor on most of PAVmed’s diversified pipeline of products which encompass a broad spectrum of clinical areas including carpal tunnel syndrome, medical infusions, interventional radiology and pediatric ENT. PAVmed went public on Nasdaq in 2016 and has a series of lead products moving towards commercialization including the much- anticipated CarpXTM device, a minimally invasive device that seeks to revolutionize the treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome and EsoGuard/EsoCheckTM an office-based alternative to endoscopy targeting tens of millions of patients with chronic acid reflux who are at risk of deadly esophageal cancer.