Becker's Spine Review

33 DEVICES & IMPLANTS 12 spine, orthopedic device companies with the top funding rounds By Mackenzie Garrity H ere are 12 orthopedic and spine device companies who com- pleted funding rounds in the last year. The companies are listed from most funding raised to least. Infervision, a Beijing, China-based arti- ficial intelligence company developing medical imaging technology, raised $47 million in series B+ financing from exist- ing and new investors. Healthcare startup Paige.ai raised $25 million for its work in cancer diagnosis through computer vision trained with clinical imaging data. Conventus Orthopaedics raised $20 million to fund and commercialize frac- ture repair therapies. Hyalex Orthopaedics completed a $16 million series A financing round. Silverback Therapeutics, a startup headed by Peter Thompson, MD, raised $10 million in venture funding. OrthAlign raised $10 million in a series D financing round. During Spineology's latest round of funding, the company secured $10 mil- lion. AxioMed closed its first round of fund- ing, with its anticipated second round already securing $10 million in pledges. Augmedics secured $8.3 million in se- ries A funding for its augmented-reality surgical visualization system, ViZOR Sys- tem. Titan Spine, based in Mequon, Wis., raised another $7.5 million for its series D funding round, which is now at $15 million. Atlanta-based Vertera Spine raised $3 million from 29 investors. Micro C, a medical device startup that manufactures a handheld X-ray and dig- ital camera imaging device for orthope- dic surgeons, raised an additional $1 million in funding, bringing their total seed amount to $2.2 million. n Johnson & Johnson jumps into orthopedic robotics, looks ahead to biologics: 5 key quotes from Q1 earnings call By Laura Dyrda J ohnson & Johnson reported 1.1 percent worldwide growth in the orthopedics segment for the first quarter of 2018 but believes the line will grow as the year goes on, according to the earnings call as posted in Seeking Alpha. CEO Alex Gorsky did not participate in the call; instead, Vice President of Investor Relations Joseph Wolk and outgoing Ex- ecutive Vice President and CFO Dominic Caruso spoke during the call. Here are five key quotes on where the company is headed in the future. On orthopedic line growth, Mr. Wolk: "We were pleased to announce during the first quarter the acquisition of Orthotaxy, which we believe will provide the next-generation robotic-as- sisted surgery which will be on display at our May 16 analyst day." On spine losses, Mr. Wolk: "We are losing share in spine and newer competitive entries are being better received in the market…we believe new offerings throughout 2018, such as Attune revision system, Attune S+ and cementless, are expect- ed to improve performance. On global supply chain changes, Mr. Caruso: "We plan to implement a series of actions across our global supply chain that are intended to focus our resources and increase invest- ments in critical capabilities, technologies and solutions nec- essary to manufacture and supply our portfolio. This will en- able us to better meet patient and customer needs, make us more agile in a rapidly evolving landscape and drive business growth." On U.S. tax legislation and reinvestment, Mr. Caruso: "The new U.S. tax legislation creates greater flexibility and oppor- tunity to capitalize on our investments in innovation and R&D. In fact, we intend to invest more than $30 billion in the U.S. with capital investments in R&D between 2018 and 2021 rep- resenting an increase over the prior four years of more than 15 percent." On future technology investments, Mr. Caruso: "Looking forward into the future, we need more of some newer tech- nologies like biologics, like investment in CAR-T for example. And we need less of the technologies that are related to some of the older parts of the portfolio. So, we need to advance our manufacturing footprint to have more capacity with new tech- nologies, less capacity with older technologies. We're going to do that from a position of strength, so that we're ready when our plans materialize and our strategies to continue to launch new products that have these newer technologies embedded in them and we want to be ready for that." n

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