ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Surgeons have been satisfied with short-segment X-ray-guided interventions for decades, but their needs are changing as more procedures move to minimally invasive, outpatient and ambulatory settings. VUZE Medical has developed a software-based guidance system for MIS spine surgery that meets the market’s changing needs by adding capabilities to the X-ray guidance already in place.
In 2015, David Tolkowsky, an Israeli computer science-trained entrepreneur, was looking for new challenges in image-guided medical interventions, where he had built decades of product marketing expertise and also as an inventor had over 50 patents granted.
Tolkowsky had previously led as CEO two successful start-ups—superDimension for 10 years and Sync-Rx for 7 years—through concept generation, product development, clinical validation, regulatory clearance, and early commercialization. The former, a pioneer in electromagnetically navigated bronchoscopy, sold to Covidien (now Medtronic) in 2012 for more than $300 million, several years after Tolkowsky had left the company. He was at the helm when the latter, a developer of a transcatheter cardiovascular image-guided intervention platform called SyncVision, was sold to Volcano Medical (now Philips), also in 2012. The products of both have since become global standards of care in their fields.
After the sale of Sync-Rx, Tolkowsky stayed on for a short time at Volcano as general manager of its Israeli business, then left to explore other opportunities. When Nissan Elimelech, a co-founder of Augmedics, then an early-stage start-up, reached out for help in developing a navigation system for spine surgery based on augmented reality, he jumped at the opportunity to work as a consultant.
