CHICAGO, Ill., October 13, 2009 — Surgeons and patients can get fast, thorough and authoritative answers to their questions about soft tissue repair such as hernia, fistula and pelvic floor repair procedures at the first-ever informational microsite for Cook Medical's Biodesign™ grafts, launched today at the 2009 Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons in Chicago. The new site, CookBiodesign.com, provides easy access to abstracts of clinical studies, research articles, news, and treatment success stories for Cook's Biodesign Advanced Tissue Repair Products, a breakthrough advancement in soft tissue repair designed for use in nine procedural areas and used in more than one million procedures in 91 countries.

CookBiodesign.com comes at a critical time in the evolution of the soft tissue repair market. According to the Millennium Research Group, the U.S. market skyrocketed to $1.2 billion in 2008, a 71 percent increase from 2006. Due in large part to this rapid growth and the increased biologic graft adoption rate from physicians, Cook has designed CookBiodesign.com to educate the medical community and patients on the benefits of Biodesign for a range of soft tissue repair procedures.

“CookBiodesign.com is the latest tool in Cook's ongoing commitment to furthering education and fostering discussion around biologic technologies,” said Andy Cron, vice president of Cook Medical's Surgery business unit. “Through the site, we are responding to and addressing a worldwide increase in biologic adoption, providing physicians with an unmatched global resource for clinical information, procedural training and disease research.  We are pleased to share it with surgeons at the meeting today.”

Cook designed the new microsite with features for physicians, patients and healthcare administrators. For physicians, online resources include a comprehensive Biodesign resource library featuring product data sheets, indications-for-use instructions, procedural videos and animations for nine of its FDA-cleared applications. There are links to the abstracts of most current published research for each procedure and disease condition, indexed through PubMed, a service of the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Healthcare administrators will also find information on best practices and treatment success rates as well as Biodesign's fundamental industry differentiators.

Patients can access an entire suite of resources to help them make informed treatment decisions. There are condition-overview documents that patients on the site can print out and take to their doctor's office, answers to commonly asked questions, video testimonials from other patients, a list of tips and questions to discuss with a physician, recommended postsurgical-care instructions, a medical glossary, and helpful links to accredited medical sites.

News and briefings benefit all three groups of users, who can sign up for e-mail updates or follow Cook Surgery on twitter at twitter.com/CookSurgery.

Biodesign is a whole new category in the evolution of soft tissue repair, addressing physicians' needs for an advanced biologic graft. Once implanted, Biodesign communicates with the body, signaling surrounding tissue to grow across the acellular scaffold, allowing the body to restore itself. Biodesign completely remodels into fully vascularized tissue that becomes stronger over time, providing a permanent repair without a permanent material. Biodesign combines the best attributes of biologic grafts–resistant to infection and complete remodelling–with the added benefits of moderate price, ease of use and widespread availability. Introduced by Cook in 1995 and manufactured in the Cook Biotech facility in West Lafayette, Ind., the grafts have a proven track record in treating a range of conditions including hernias, fistulas, stress urinary incontinence, pelvic organ prolapse, and Peyronie's disease, as well as in staple-line reinforcement for bariatric surgery and plastic and reconstructive surgery. To date, nearly 750 clinical articles have been published on the technology behind Biodesign.

About Cook Medical
Cook Medical helped invent and popularize interventional medicine, pioneering many of the devices now commonly used worldwide to perform minimally invasive medical procedures throughout the body's vascular, gastrointestinal, respiratory, urological and OB/GYN pathways. Today, the company integrates minimally invasive medical device design, biopharma, gene and cell therapy and biotech to enhance patient safety and improve clinical outcomes in the fields of aortic intervention; interventional radiology; critical care medicine; gastroenterology; peripheral vascular medicine; bone access and oncology; interventional cardiology; general surgery and soft tissue repair; urology; and assisted reproductive technology, gynecology and high-risk obstetrics. Founded in 1963, Cook Medical operates as a family-held private corporation focused on providing superior patient outcomes while reducing health care delivery costs. For more information, visit www.cookmedical.com. Follow Cook Medical on Twitter at twitter.com/cookmedicalpr.