The Life Warmer team

Dr. Pettini is the founder of Life Warmer and serves as Chief Medical Officer. While pursuing his clinical career, he also developed the initial concept and technology for Life Warmer. His clinical career path has provided an especially unique perspective to the development of Life Warmer.

Dr. Pettini began his clinical career working in pre-hospital care as a paramedic and then paramedic director in the 1980’s in the Boston area. This environment gave him his first unique experiences into trying to maintain or re-establish patient normothermia on a daily basis. This is when he first conceptualized the Life Warmer Technology.

While working as a paramedic, he also pursued a degree in nursing from the University of the State of New York in Albany, N.Y. Working as a nurse, he gained experience in both the operating room environments as well as emergency room. These environments gave him even more experience and insight into the detrimental effects of inadvertent or accidental hypothermia for patients and most especially the continued of effective and adequate offerings to help him and others to address the issue.

Later he earned his degree in Osteopathic Medicine from Midwestern University, Glendale, Ariz. He completed his residency in emergency medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern at Dallas/Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where he served as Chief Resident.

Following his residency, Dr. Pettini returned to Connecticut, where he practices as a Board Certified Emergency Medicine Physician with St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, Connecticut.

While remaining primarily committed to his clinical practice, Dr. Pettini also began a dedicated effort to further the development of Life Warmer and its associated technologies. He formed and incorporated the company in 2007 and in 2009 began the pursuit of putting a management team together.

He is a Diplomat of the American College of Emergency Physicians and member of the Connecticut College of Emergency Physicians as well as the Special Operations Medical Association (SOMA)

Rick joined Life Warmer as the CEO in September of 2009. He also brings a unique background especially well suited to the development of Life Warmer.

He has spent the majority of his career involved with driving business for aggressive growth medical device and life sciences companies beginning with US Surgical in 1989.

In 1995, he had attained national responsibility with US Surgical serving as one of three in the newly created financial consulting arm on cost containment. Most work was done with GPOs and major hospital systems dealing with cost justification and reimbursement issues of procedures with which US Surgical was involved. During his tenure with US Surgical he was most fortunate to be part of the growth from $172 million to well over a billion dollars in annual revenue, thus attracting the company acquisition by Tyco.

In early 1997, in order to pursue product development more fully, he left his ongoing device career at US Surgical to delve into high tech electronic contract manufacturing. He spent the next several years running divisions of two separate engineering focused electronic contract manufacturing concerns. On the technical side that experience included managing and developing engineering services, manufacturing, quality systems, with most work done with newly developed embedded technologies in printed circuit boards. Key customers included RIMM – predecessor devices to the Blackberry and also work with early Palm Pilots. On the business side, this was the first experience dealing with mergers and acquisitions and with managing P&L.

Rick returned to the medical device world working with two consecutive challenged or distressed companies/situations to assist in their returns to positive growth.

Most recently he worked with VisualSonics, a Toronto based manufacturer of imaging technology for the scientific research community. He helped lead VisualSonics’ sales growth from $8.5MM to over $26MM in less than four years.

Rick began his career and gained his initial financial experience as a broker with the elite Wall Street firm Kidder Peabody.

Rick also currently serves as an advisor with NTEC – North Texas Enterprise Center for Medical Technology, a Medical Device Accelerator in Frisco, Texas and as an advisor/mentor with Tech Fort Worth, a Technology Incubator/Accelerator in Ft. Worth, Texas. He is also a Life Sciences Evaluator for the Emerging Technology Fund of Texas – North Texas RCIC in Dallas, Texas.

Rick holds a BBA in Marketing with an emphasis in Biology from Texas Tech University.

John joined Life Warmer in November of 2009. He has extensive experience with all phases of medical devices from initial concept through regulatory clearance. With Life Warmer, John manages all aspects of product engineering and development. He is further responsible for the quality systems as well as regulatory activities.

Most recently, John has been serving in an executive management capacity for Medical Technology, Inc., an orthopedic equipment manufacturer, directing product development, regulatory, and quality assurance activities.

Prior to that, John worked with Galt Medical, a subsidiary of Theragenics, in Garland, Texas, a manufacturer of vascular access products, where he was an Engineering Project Director. While there, he developed numerous product family customizations for key OEM customers, including Smith & Nephew, B. Braun, Vascular Solutions, and AngioDynamics. He also developed and launched a new, non-vascular access and drainage product line with Galt.

Prior to his work with Galt, John worked with two medical device start-up companies. One was Alpha Med-Surge, where he served as Director of Research & Development. He was responsible for product development, regulatory, and quality system establishment.

John also had start-up experience with Intrasafe Medical, where he was Director of Operations. They developed an infusion manifold. He successfully guided the company through their first FDA inspection. He also managed the outsourced development of their next generation product.

John spent almost fifteen years with Orthofix. He was Director of Product Development Engineering. They designed and manufactured pulsed electromagnetic field therapy equipment, fixation devices, and bracing products for prescription use by orthopedists, neurosurgeons, and podiatrists. He also directed development of two bone growth stimulator product lines, which accounted for over 60% of domestic sales at Orthofix. He directed development of the company’s first implantable device. He planned and directed device testing to enable PMA, IDE, and 510K FDA approvals.

John holds a B.S.E.E. from Rice University and an M.S.E.E. from the University of Texas. He has 24 issued or pending U.S. Patents for various medical devices, and has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Life Warmer’s CFO has 20 years experience in the medical arena with primarily a pharmaceutical background. The great majority of that time has been in the role of CFO. Currently he is in the process of assisting another concern in their fundraising efforts and must remain anonymous. He has an ownership stake in Life Warmer and is involved in all ongoing efforts. He is committed to joining Life Warmer on a permanent basis when the timing and funding provide for it. He is available for contact on a confidential basis.