Medical Devices and Diagnostics

Advanced medical devices and diagnostic tools are often ways to describe the same piece of equipment, when it's a high-tech way to detect disease.

But like everything else in modern medicine, there's a constantly evolving landscape in which medical devices and diagnostics may stand completely on their own.

North Carolina is home to companies developing everything from nano-scale medical devices that can transport and treat, all the way up to large robotic systems to help surgeons create big changes through small incisions. And the state's diagnostic expertise includes tabletop "labs" for on-farm early mastitis detection, all the way to quick and efficient cancer and digestive disease detection for humans.

Advanced medical devices and diagnostic tools don't usually face the same years-long regulatory hurdles that must be cleared by therapeutics. That can make their developers attractive to investors. And that ultimately contributes tens of millions of dollars a year to North Carolina's economic bottom line.

North Carolina's Leading Device and Diagnostic Companies

LabCorp

Burlington-based LabCorp is a global life science company built on laboratory diagnostic testing, pioneering in technologies for diagnostic testing and genetic analysis of diseases such as cancer, HIV and cystic fibrosis. In 2017 it acquired Chiltern International, a contract research organization, for about $1.2 billion. Now LabCorp employs more than 56,000 people worldwide and earned net revenues of nearly $9.5 billion in 2016.

Asensus Surgical

Asensus Surgical is a Research Triangle Park-based medical device company that is digitizing the interface between surgeons and patients for minimally invasive surgery. The company was founded in 2006, by Synecor, a Chapel Hill business accelerator that spun out of Duke University in 2001 to commercialize medical device inventions. The company has approvals for various technologies in the U.S., Europe, Japan and other geographies.

Genova Diagnostics

In Asheville, Genova Diagnostics has spent more than 30 years developing 125 different testing panels that allow doctors to focus on the intricacies of the body’s metabolism rather than on just one single measure typically provided from a blood test. Today, Genova employs more than 300 people in two Asheville-area locations, with more than 250 additional employees at locations in Atlanta and London.

Cook Medical

Minimally invasive medical devices developed by Cook Medical in North Carolina's Piedmont Triad are among the family-owned business's 16,000 products that serve 13 hospital lines in 135 countries. Founded in 1963 in Bloomington, Ind., Cook has 12,000 employees worldwide, including 640 at the endoscopy unit in Winston-Salem.

Access to all North Carolina medical device companies can be found on the Company Directory.