Tryton moving HQ to Triangle

CEO is industry veteran, transplant

A small Boston company that's working on a new type of stent will move its headquarters to the Triangle, where its new chief executive officer lives.

J. Greg Davis, a former executive at medical-device maker Guidant, was named chief executive of Tryton Medical on Monday. The Boston startup has four employees and $14 million in venture capital, raised last month.

Davis and his family moved to Chapel Hill about 18 months ago, shortly after Boston Scientific bought Guidant of Indianapolis.

His decision to move was partly driven by North Carolina's emerging medical-device industry, Davis said. "This was a great place to live," he said. "But I knew I also would go back to work."

North Carolina is better known as a drug research hub. But the number of medical-device companies in the state rose from 86 in 1990 to 142 in 2006, according to a report by the N.C. Biotechnology Center.

The industry employs about 7,000 people statewide.

"This is a place where you can start, run and grow a medical-device company, and people are becoming aware of it," said Sam Taylor, president of the N.C. Biosciences Organization, the industry's trade organization.

Tryton looking for digs

Tryton will begin looking for office space in the Research Triangle area and hiring, Davis said. By the end of the year, he expects to oversee a staff of about a dozen, several of them in Europe, where the company's first product is expected to come to market late in the summer.

Founded in 2003, Tryton uses technology developed at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H., to prevent blockages in small blood vessels. Stents are scaffolds that are implanted to prop open blood vessel and prevent blockages that can lead to heart attacks.

However, the metal stents currently on the market tend to be too large and difficult to implant in some small vessels. The smaller stents Tryton is targeting have yet to be tested in the U.S.