A stable job is every middle class family’s dream. So when Manish Doshi, born into one such family, decided to quit a campus placement job in the late 1980s, it left his parents and siblings anxious and disappointed. India was yet to open up its economy, and walking away from a stable job was widely seen as reckless. Doshi, however, was determined to break free from that mindset, trusting his intuition and inventive spirit to chart his entrepreneurial path. A textile engineering graduate, he began his journey in chemical trading. Over the next three decades, he would evolve into a visionary medtech entrepreneur, building innovative, life-saving medical technologies in India for the global market.
Around the mid-1990s, Doshi expanded his entrepreneurial footprint by partnering with his brother-in-law, who ran laser diamond cutting units. Together, they set up an industrial laser job shop. The turning point came in 1997–98, when a German company approached the unit to cut a medical stent—a tiny mesh tube inserted in clogged arteries or veins to open them up and improve blood flow. These stents were exorbitantly priced. So, Doshi, instead of remaining a contract manufacturer, made a decisive leap. He and his partners chose to design and manufacture their own stent, creating Sahajanand Medical Technologies. By 1999–2000, the company had developed an indigenous coronary stent—the Millennium stent. It offered a low-cost alternative to imported stents, making angioplasty more affordable. While imported stents were sold for Rs80,000, the Millennium stent was launched at Rs15,000. Yet, doctors were reluctant to use an Indian-made life-saving device.
“We distributed 600 samples across India, but none used even after six months,” recalls Doshi, adding that he soon grasped that price alone could not overcome entrenched perceptions. The stent was subsequently rebranded and relaunched as SFX-108 and sold for Rs48,000, after which adoption rose sharply. “That taught us a critical lesson about the Indian market,” he says. As confidence in domestic innovation grew, Sahajanand went on to develop a drug-eluting stent in 2003—the first to use a biodegradable polymer.
However, in 2005, while clinical trials for the stent were underway in the Netherlands, Boston Scientific Corporation and Angiotech Pharmaceuticals filed a patent lawsuit against Sahajanand’s Infinnium paclitaxel-eluting stent (paclitaxel is a chemotherapy drug). A Dutch court ruled against the company, prohibiting it from selling, marketing, or distributing the Infinnium stent in the Netherlands. “That experience deeply influenced me,” says Doshi. When he exited Sahajanand in 2007 following differences with his partner, he carried with him a clear resolve: future innovation would be built on uncompromising intellectual property protection. Around the same time, he began pursuing a far more difficult challenge—developing a drug-coated balloon that used sirolimus, an immunosuppresant that also prevents abnormal cell growth.
The need was undeniable. Heart disease remains one of the world’s leading killers, driven largely by coronary artery disease, in which fatty deposits narrow or block blood vessels supplying the heart. While stents and conventional drug-coated balloons have transformed care, they are not without limitations. Metal stents permanently cage the artery, impairing its natural movement and sometimes triggering late complications such as restenosis (re-narrowing of the blood vessel) or thrombosis (clotting). Earlier drug-coated balloons, largely reliant on paclitaxel, act quickly but lack sustained biological effect. These shortcomings are particularly acute in small vessels, complex lesions, bifurcations and in-stent restenosis—precisely the cases where physicians need better, implant-free solutions.
It was this unmet clinical gap that led Doshi to found Concept Medical and develop MagicTouch, the world’s first sirolimus-coated balloon. The philosophy behind the technology marked a fundamental shift: treat the disease inside the artery without leaving anything behind. Instead of relying on a permanent scaffold or a short-acting drug burst, MagicTouch aimed to trigger biological healing of the vessel itself—allowing the artery to recover its natural function once the therapy was delivered.
At the core of MagicTouch is nanolute technology, a proprietary drug-delivery platform designed to overcome sirolimus’s known challenges. Sirolimus, long considered the gold standard in interventional cardiology, offers controlled inhibition of abnormal cell growth, reduced inflammation and support for natural healing. “However, sirolimus is unstable and poorly lipophilic (washes out quickly), making it hard to deliver. Even today, among 20–30 drug-coated balloons globally, only two use sirolimus,” notes Doshi. “We reduced the drug particle size from about 90 microns to 0.35 microns, studied arterial tissue porosity and delivered the drug deep into the vessel wall, where it acts as a reservoir. We also developed an excipient that improves drug binding and bioavailability.” With this engineered solution, the artery itself becomes a drug reservoir, enabling sustained release long after the balloon is removed.
“By 2009, we had completed our first animal studies for what later became MagicTouch. Between 2008 and 2009, I filed patents aggressively to avoid repeating past mistakes. Today, 132 patents are granted globally, giving us full freedom to operate,” says Doshi.
Today, Concept Medical’s drug-coated stents and related drug-delivery technologies are commercially available and used in over 80 countries. “Our innovation earned major milestones: Concept Medical became the first Indian medical device company to receive five Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) approvals—required for pivotal clinical trials—from the US FDA. Clinical trials are currently ongoing in the US. MagicTouch’s commercial entry in Japan is expected this year, and the US commercial launch is projected for 2028,” says Doshi.
Doshi asserts that in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)—the procedure used to restore blood flow to the heart without open-heart surgery—drug-coated balloons represent the future. “In India, 90 per cent of PCI procedures still use stents,” he says. “In Europe, nearly 30 per cent have already shifted to balloons. Market studies suggest that by 2034, 70–80 per cent of PCI procedures will be implant-free.”
Doshi himself underwent a stent-free angioplasty using MagicTouch four years ago. “MagicTouch already addresses most coronary problems,” he says, adding that Concept Medical is expanding its application into other critical areas, including below-the-knee vascular disease, erectile dysfunction, carotid artery disease, ischemic stroke and urethral strictures.