Insulet appoints Patrick Ryan as Chief Operating Officer, replacing Charlie Liamos – January 27, 2014

Last week, Insulet announced the appointment of Mr. Patrick Ryan as Chief Operating Officer, replacing Mr. Charles Liamos (Insulet's COO since 2010). Mr. Liamos will stay on full-time for the next couple of months, followed by a part-time role to ensure a smooth transition – importantly, he will continue to serve as a member of Insulet's board of directors, a role he has held since 2005. Insulet now has the capacity to produce one million pods per month (this is enough for approximately 100,000 patients!); it’s our sense that Charlie Liamos, who is known as an operational powerhouse, effectively came on in order to get manufacturing in order and to see the new OmniPod through regulatory approval – this is a wonderful time for Mr. Liamos to step down. Indeed, he has been highly successful to date and absolutely never “needed” to take on the position at Insulet (he has been a highly successful executive historically, especially helping lead TheraSense in the early 2000s) – it was wonderful for patients that he said yes to the call to help the Insulet team and we can now imagine he is happy to be helpful at the board level and working in a part-time advisory role at the company.

We are glad to see that Mr. Ryan brings extensive previous medical device experience to Insulet, including roles as Chief Operating Officer at Alphatec Spine and as a VP at Abbott Vascular. Mr. Ryan gets high marks all around and we believe he'll be an excellent fit for the COO role at Insulet. He's said to be a focused, disciplined manager who achieves very good execution – these will be valuable qualities for Insulet's COO, of course, where the challenges are no longer regulatory but now all about execution (see below). From what we understand, Mr. Ryan listens well to what customers are looking for and is said to be good at taking external input to make valuable internal changes. While Mr. Ryan doesn't have diabetes experience per se, Insulet should certainly benefit from his wide range of experiences. Earlier in his career, Mr. Ryan was a submarine commander (meaning he can certainly handle type A patients and their parents!), followed by manufacturing operations for Guidant (pacemakers and stents). At the time of the Guidant acquisition by Abbott, he was leading the manufacturing scale-up of Xience, a drug eluting stent that went on to great success. Pat was the VP of Operations at Abbott Vascular shortly after the acquisition, and he had ambitions to develop capabilities beyond his operations background. Ultimately, he ran Canada and Latin America commercial organizations for Abbott Vascular, doing a good job in this role, and developing very different but complimentary skills that should now be very suitable for the Insulet COO role.  On the personal front, Mr Ryan is said to be easy to talk to, outdoors oriented and passionate about staying fit - we look really forward to meeting him!

• At JPM 2014, CEO Mr. Duane DeSisto highlighted that while manufacturing was a big challenge in 2013 during the second-gen pod transition, supply constraints are now largely resolved – clearly, Mr. Liamos worked hard on this front as part of his manufacturing work. Mr. DeSisto emphasized that 2014 is "all about execution" and driving sales of the new pod, unlike past years that have focused on manufacturing and/or getting products through the FDA. Certainly, the addition of 20 new sales reps should help Ryan quite a lot on the execution front! The company exited 2013 with an installed base of ~60,000 customers, representing ~15% of the US insulin pump market. It’s good to know that there is already capacity for so many more. For more, please see our coverage of Insulet's presentation and breakout from JPM 2014.

--by Adam Brown and Kelly Close