ConforMIS Gets Personal With $89 Million Round

Article preview from Start-Up - February, 2012

ConforMIS last month closed on an $89 million Series E round to help pay for the company’s commercial launch of iTotal, customized, patient-specific total knee implants.

ConforMIS Gets Personal With $89 Million Round

Article preview from Start-Up - February, 2012

Venture capitalists make their livings investing in new technologies that outperform the current gold standard. For years, this focus kept investors away from companies developing new knee and hip replacements, as both tried-and-true procedures boast ridiculously high success rates. Private investors also largely avoided investing in companies developing new implants because the cost of development would be as high as the competition from major medical device suppliers is fierce. But some research is beginning to peel away at large joint implants’ invincibility, potentially creating an opportunity.

True, hip and knee implants are durable and don’t fall apart (although concerns over material from which those implants are made continue to be under tight review). But there are questions about whether more patients than previously are suffering from misaligned implants. In a study that was at least partially funded by Stryker Corp.’s Stryker Orthopaedics, surgeons at the Athens Orthopedic Center in Athens, GA, found 40% of the 176 knees they implanted in men and 68% of the 261 knees implanted in women had overhangs, at least three mm of space where the knee bone and implant didn’t match. The positioning is significant because any overhang of 3mm doubles the chances that an implant recipient will suffer from “clinically important knee pain,” according to the study.

Many major implant makers are trying to meet the demand for ways of personalizing or customizing knee implants. Typically, the answers from companies like  DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. (a division of Johnson & Johnson’s  DePuy Inc.) and Biomet Inc. have come in the form of cutting blocks that are cast from images taken of the patients’ knees prior to surgery. The blocks serve as guides for surgeons, enabling them to cut off exactly what needs to be cut in order to make the implant fit precisely. ConforMIS Inc.,manufacturer of a line of knee implants that are custom made for each individual patient, is taking a different approach.

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