The Heart Sensor That Started in a Georgia Tech Lab

Long before Atlanta was recognized as a life sciences hub, Mark Allen was building the kind of technology most people would never see, because it was designed to be implanted and forgotten. A Georgia Tech engineer working in the young field of microelectromechanical systems or MEMS, Allen spent more than two decades turning laboratory research into companies, patents, and eventually a device that now sits inside the arteries of heart failure patients across the country. His career traces several eras of Georgia’s innovation economy: university research, technology transfer, medical device commercialization, and the arrival of a global healthcare company in the city’s newest research district.

What makes Allen’s influence notable is not only the device he helped invent, but the pathway he helped build around it. Over 24 years at Georgia Tech, his work shaped how the Institute moved discoveries out of the lab and into the market, how Atlanta came to be seen as a place where medical technology could be founded and scaled, and how a paperclip-sized sensor could travel from a campus cleanroom to hospitals nationwide.

A Cardiologist’s Question and a Georgia Tech Lab

In 2001, Jay Yadav, an interventional cardiologist then at the Cleveland Clinic, approached Allen with a question. MEMS technology was still in its infancy, and Yadav wondered whether the tiny sensors Allen had been developing for other applications could be used to measure pressure inside the human body, particularly in patients with congestive heart failure.

That conversation became CardioMEMS, which Allen and Yadav co-founded the same year. Because the technology depended so directly on Allen and his students, the company chose to stay in Atlanta rather than relocate. It entered Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the Institute’s startup incubator, and drew early support from the Georgia Research Alliance.

The idea was relatively simple. Rather than wait for a heart failure patient to deteriorate and land in the hospital, a small sensor implanted in the pulmonary artery could track rising pressure and send that data to physicians wirelessly, giving them time to adjust medication before a crisis. Millions of Americans live with heart failure, a chronic condition in which a weakened or enlarged heart cannot pump blood effectively, and a tool that flagged trouble early promised to keep more of them out of the hospital.

Building the Institution Around the Invention

Allen’s contribution to Atlanta’s innovation economy extended well beyond a single company. He joined Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1989 and rose to the rank of Regents’ Professor, holding the J.M. Pettit Professorship in Microelectronics along with a joint appointment in chemical and biomolecular engineering.

From 2007 to 2010, he served as Georgia Tech’s senior vice provost for research and innovation, overseeing the Institute’s research portfolio and the commercialization of the intellectual property developed in its labs. He later became founding director of the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, which coordinates the university’s work across nanotechnology and electronics. In those roles, Allen helped shape the machinery of technology transfer that founders after him would rely on.

CardioMEMS was not the first company to come out of that machinery. In 1999, Allen and colleague Mark Prausnitz co-founded a microneedle company focused on delivering drugs through the skin, which was sold in 2001.

Allen left Georgia Tech in 2013 to direct the Singh Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania, but the sensor he helped create was just reaching a defining milestone.

A Paperclip-Sized Sensor

The device that emerged, known as the CardioMEMS HF System and originally dubbed Champion, is roughly the size of a paperclip and contains no battery or wires. Implanted in the pulmonary artery through a minimally invasive procedure, it uses radio frequency energy to transmit real-time pressure readings to an external unit, which relays the information to the patient’s care team.

In May 2014, the FDA approved the monitor, making it the first MEMS-based medical device transducer cleared for permanent implantation in the human body. It was the culmination of more than a decade of testing and refinement, and it validated a premise that had once been speculative: that a sensor small enough to live inside an artery could meaningfully change how a chronic disease was managed.

From Startup to St. Jude to Abbott

The recognition came quickly. Just two months after the FDA approval, in July 2014, St. Jude Medical acquired CardioMEMS, folding the sensor into a company with the manufacturing and distribution reach to scale it.

St. Jude did not remain independent for long. In January 2017, Abbott completed its acquisition of St. Jude Medical in a deal valued at roughly $25 billion, one of the largest in the medical device industry. CardioMEMS became part of Abbott’s heart failure portfolio, and the technology kept expanding. In 2022, the FDA broadened the device’s approved use to include patients with milder, Class II heart failure, extending the reach of a product that had started as a Georgia Tech research project.

Mark Allen’s legacy is tied not only to the device he helped invent, but to the pathway from lab to market that he helped build.