As procedural complexity continues to rise across oncology and women’s health, a range of technologies are rapidly converging.
This shift is significantly reshaping how medical devices are perceived. Today, many devices are augmented with capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and advanced imaging technologies. As a result, both the development process and the long-term value proposition of a device are increasingly evaluated in a more integrated, holistic way as it moves toward and enters the market.
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At Biomed Israel, taking place from 12-14 May, Eyal Lifschitz, managing general partner at VC firm Peregrine Ventures, will co-moderate a session entitled “The device is no longer a device: convergence in medical technology” alongside Eran Lerer, managing partner at Shoni Health Ventures, and Irit Yaniv, founding partner and CEO of Almeda Ventures.
The session will focus on topics including how technologies such as robotics, AI, and advanced materials are redefining how devices interact with patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems, and how this convergence is blurring the lines between areas including diagnostics, therapeutics, and patient monitoring.
Lifschitz spoke with Medical Device Network about Biomed 2026 and the session he is co-moderating, along with the shifting role of medical devices, and the advantages of the Israeli medical device ecosystem.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ross Law (RL): Explain more about the title of the Biomed session you are co-moderating.
Eyal Lifschitz (EL): It’s titled as such because the trend nowadays is that devices are no longer just standalone devices, they’re everything together, meaning there is a convergence between biotech, the device, and its software, given the inherent rise in procedural complexity.
For example, today, you can’t do a minimal invasive oncology procedure in the lungs without substantial software, or in the brain, or put a mitral valve in the right place without substantial software. All of these domains converge together to assure the success of medical devices for procedures of this sort.
As an investor, the focus of our fund has not really changed, and investing in more than standalone products has remained our strategy over the past few decades. The appreciable change is that therapeutic devices have become more complex. Often it is now standard, no matter what the device is, for it to have multiple components to it. Whether they are pharma-dominant devices, drug delivery systems, or smart pills, the mechanistic aspects tend to be combined with software, and this is true of procedural planning for devices, too.
When you plan a procedure, even a simple stent procedure, fluoroscopy was once enough. But nowadays, there is typically an imaging component inherent to the application of these devices too, with software again taking on a common role in surgical planning across a range of procedure types. Meanwhile, in conducting procedures, adjunct technologies including CT imaging, real-time analytics and more are being combined as clinicians plan and determine where a system is going to be anchored.
RL: Provide some examples of the companies being highlighted during this session.
EL: First, we chose two areas of broad categories for this session. We chose oncology because, while many will believe this is predominantly a medical field that sits on the pharmaceutical side, but within this space, there’s a lot going on in devices, too.
The second area which we wanted to cover is what we call health by gender. This area relates to technologies which apply to women’s health, in areas including incontinence and fertility and in areas related to men, like infertility, prostate and others. These are again areas we initially thought would be more pharma dominant, but again, there is also a considerable amount of development occurring on the medical device side.
To give a few examples of participating companies, one is Snipe, which uses a technology called electroporation. Electroporation is a new way to kill tissue, but not by heat and not in freezing it, nor by high-powered ultrasound. This approach involves the application of high-voltage electric fields in very controlled areas, to kill cancer in the lungs. The approach, however, leaves the mechanical part of the tissue intact so it doesn’t collapse.
We also have Nina Medical in attendance, which is treating prostate cancer with ultrasound, non-invasively. Another participant is Xerient, a company that delivers a drug into the duodenum to treat different types of cancer. PregnanTech is also featured, which has a product called Lioness to prevent early birth. We feel that these companies provide an excellent representation of the innovation occurring both in oncology and gender health, amply demonstrating that devices have an advancing role, beyond the application of pharmaceuticals.
RL: In your view, what do the companies you’ve mentioned and others that have developed within Israel demonstrate about the country’s medtech sector?
EL: If you look at what’s happening here in medical technology, there’s almost no important medical technology that came to the market in the last 30 years which is not completely Israeli or has a very big Israeli component. It’s completely out of proportion. If you look at fields including MRI, stents, balloons, pacemakers, atrial fibrillation (AF), it comes to the market via the big US strategics, but it often starts as Israeli-developed technology. For such a small country, this is a remarkable achievement.
RL: What, in your view, makes the Israeli medtech ecosystem as effective as it is?
EL: There are many reasons for this, but I would say that the main one is that until the late ‘70s, Israel was somewhat of an island, and we really had to build everything by ourselves. The only way this can be achieved is via the rapid integration between technologies. We have excellent, world-leading universities and medical centres teaching medicine, biology, engineering, physics and mechanics that bring to the industry the talent needed to take groundbreaking ideas and turn them into technologies and startups that change the quality of life of patients and patient outcome all over the world.
