Ideas in action

Physician, entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “tinkerer” revolutionizes peripheral vascular disease treatment

By Linda Knopp

Four years after James Joye, D.O. (’88), graduated from OU-COM, he met catheter engineer Ronald Williams for dinner to discuss an idea he’d been kicking around: using a liquid nitrous oxide to treat clogged leg arteries. That discussion led the pair to co-found CryoVascular Systems – a business that provided physicians a safer, less-invasive way to treat vascular disease.  

“In just 10 years, we went from an idea sketched out on a napkin to a product that’s used in most hospitals in the country and many places around the world,” Joye says. “I’ve always had an investigative slant to the way I approach things, so I developed an interest in medical research very early on.”

Joye is widely credited with developing cryoplasty, which uses nitrous oxide to freeze plaque in leg arteries, inducing a type of cell death called apoptosis. Essentially, Joye says, cryoplasty causes arterial plaque to self-destruct. While less traumatic than bypass surgery or angioplasty, this technique also seems to have a lower incidence of restenosis, or reclogging, since it avoids scarring. This is welcome news for more than 10 million people in the United States who suffer from peripheral vascular disease.

Joye, who serves as director of vascular/cartoid intervention and research at Advanced Cardiovascular Specialists, and director of research and education at the Heart and Vascular Institute at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., has co-founded two medical device start-up companies, and he holds about 20 patents.

Through both CryoVascular Systems and PQ Bypass – his latest medical device start-up, which launched last year – Joye says he aims to find new ways of performing medical procedures for better patient outcomes. For example, PQ Bypass focuses on a family of products and methods that offer a less invasive approach to open-leg bypass surgery: through a single puncture wound. This reduces the risk of post-operative complications, allowing many patients to walk out of the hospital the same day as their surgeries.

When Joye was completing his residency and fellowship at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, the field of cardiovascular medicine was transitioning from a more conservative drugs-only therapy to more progressive treatment methods using new medical devices. “There was a lot of progress made in the field during that time, and I was lucky enough to get a lot of hands-on time with devices during their formative stages,” he says. “It was a case of being at the right place at the right time.”

When Joye first had the spark of the idea that would lead him to develop cryoplasty, he says he was experiencing success in research and publishing. He recalls having to buck the advice of colleagues who warned about the financial and legal risks of moving the research into the marketplace. “In the end, though, there’s a difference between the people who have ideas and the people who do things,” he says, “and the people who do things are entrepreneurs.” 

Boston Scientific Corporation, a Massachusetts-based company with products in a broad range of interventional medical specialties, initially distributed CryoVascular’s PolarCath Peripheral CryoPlasty System; the firm acquired CryoVascular in 2005 and continues to distribute its products worldwide.       

Joye credits his OU-COM education with giving him the courage to try new things and strike out on a daunting career path as a biomedical researcher and entrepreneur.

“The environment (at OU-COM) favors and nurtures self-starters with inquisitive minds who are not afraid to ask questions and challenge dogma,” he says. “It’s a supportive environment for that. And afterwards, you never know where your career can take you.”