ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Orthopedics is a specialty that attracts the mechanically minded; innovation here is often advanced by the surgeons themselves. That’s the case with several MedTech Innovator accelerator companies helping to create more durable solutions and a faster return to load-bearing life. We interview X-Bolt Orthopedics, Solenic Medical, and Orthomod.
We present another installment of our continuing series on innovative companies that have benefited from the programs of MedTech Innovator, which, each year, graduates dozens of start-ups that experience the tutelage of leading medical device companies, investors, thought-leading clinicians, and service providers, to name only a few classes of mentors. (See “MedTech Innovator at Ten,” MedTech Strategist, November 6, 2024). MedTech Innovator continues to vet, mentor, and bring start-ups to the attention of investors and strategic companies looking toward the future of their product pipelines. Now on its 11th cohort, the accelerator recently announced its duly and diligently selected companies for 2025, which will be introduced to investors at MedTech World in San Jose, CA on June 27.
In this article, we focus on orthopedics, a $62 billion global industry fueled by wear and tear and aging. We interview Brian Thornes, MD, founder and CEO of X-Bolt Orthopedics (MTI Cohort ’24). X-Bolt, his second start-up (his first was sold to Arthrex), is focusing on the problem of durable fixation in aging bone.
Having gone through the accelerator in the mid-stage category, Thornes notes that although he is a seasoned surgeon-entrepreneur, the mentorship helped him leverage the clinical data the company had gathered to approach hospital value access committees. “We've been quite successful getting through VACs because we have over a thousand cases done clinically and two large trials that have demonstrated a really low cut-out rate,” Thornes says, adding that his start-up possesses more data than orthopedic start-ups generally have. “The help we got from MedTech Innovator to advance our messaging was brilliant.”
