Xconomy: ConforMIS is Reaching for a Big Piece of the Knee-Surgery Market by Taking Smaller Pieces of Bone
Summary
Several of them fall into an emerging category of “resurfacing devices” that cover bone damaged by arthritis or trauma with smooth pieces of plastic or metal—while leaving the bulk of the joint intact.ConforMIS’s trick for minimizing the slicing and dicing that needs to be done to implant these devices, explains Philipp Lang, the company’s chairman and founder, is to tailor each one to precisely fit the patient’s existing anatomy.“The fundamental challenge is that a joint is a complex 3-D structure, and it has tremendous variability between patients,” says Lang, who in his day job is the director of musculoskeletal radiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.Lang says that hard data on recovery is difficult to come by, but one study showed that it took an average of seven weeks for patients to get back to their pre-operative levels of pain.In a clinical trial of ConforMIS’s smallest implant, which doesn’t require any bone resection, patients already showed improvements over their pre-op pain levels at the time they were discharged from the hospital, he says.