This R.I. startup wants to change the way sports medicine treats injuries (Boston Globe)
Native Orthopaedics introduces a suture zip tie for sports medicine, allowing precise tensioning and adjustment during surgery for better, more predictable tissue repair.
“What we’ve come up with here is, think of it as a zip tie, but it’s a suture zip tie,” said Tom Gamache, co-founder and CEO of Native Orthopaedics.
PROVIDENCE — Tom Gamache, the CEO of Rhode Island-based Native Orthopaedics, a startup that wants to reimagine the way sports medicine treats injuries, said his cofounder Christian Anderson was inspired by fly-fishing.
Anderson, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist is based in Nashville, Tenn., holds records for fly-fishing.
“Some of the observations from fly-fishing with knot tying and line splicing, he recognized that they could potentially fix some of the challenges that he was facing in the sports medicine space with soft tissue repair,” Gamache, 44, told the Globe. “So that was the beginning of the idea.”
Anderson partnered with Gamache, who has a background in mechanical engineering, and created Native Orthopaedics, which launched in April 2024. The company has six full-time employees and recently won a $75,000 innovation award from the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation.
Q: What is your company’s innovation and what you are trying to do in sports medicine?
Tom Gamache: When a patient has an injury and they tear tissue, surgeons will repair it with sutures … Think of it as a frayed rope. When a frayed rope comes apart, how would you bring that back together? The same thing happens in critical ligaments and tendons in your body, especially in the knee.
The problem with the technologies that are out there today is, surgeons have to thread sutures through torn tissue then secure it by tying knots, which is unreliable. And depending on how great they do with that construct repair, it will determine if that patient will heal or if their disease will progress to osteoarthritis.
What we’ve come up with here is, think of it as a zip tie, but it’s a suture zip tie. A zip tie that you would buy from a local hardware store allows you to precisely dial in the tension and hold that tension exactly where it needs to be precise for that patient.
With our technology … while that patient is in surgery, the surgeon can then flex that patient, meaning, bring their leg, for example, in flexion and extension, and then see where that tissue repair construct landed and if they need to readjust. Our technology allows the surgeon to do that right there in the operating room.
On the left is a tibial (bottom half of the knee joint) educational bone model with tunnels drilled to pass sutures through for soft tissue repair. On the right is a comparison of suture constructs stitched into a ligament and tensioned. Native’s knotless retensionable suture, the Dragonfly (black with checks), and the traditional knotted sutures (solid white).Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
How are you financing your business?
So the founders put the initial capital into the company and then we opened up a seed round in August. We’re closing that seed round now. That gives us plenty of runway to get [a Food and Drug Administration]-cleared product on the market and generate revenue in 2025.
An interesting nuance about our fundraising strategy was over 80 percent of our investors are actual surgeons that have seen the product and fell in love with what it can do for their practice and for patients.
[Thus far we have raised] close to $3 million.
Where are you in your FDA approval process?
We have an FDA submission going in [December] … So we would expect to have clearance early in the second quarter of 2025.
What are your plans after securing FDA approval?
Then we start selling product. So we have connections and network in this business that would allow us to put the technology, the product, into surgeons’ hands, hospital systems throughout the country.
How will your technology change the treatment of sports injuries?
Today when surgeons go to do some of these types of procedures, it’s not very predictable how long the procedure will take. Our construct and our technology allows them to have a better understanding of, from start to finish, regardless of what complications they’re faced in the operating room, what the end outcome should be, and how long that should take for them to get there.
To summarize, how does your procedure work?
This is another way that we’ve described it that really resonates with the investment community and readers, would be a Chinese finger trap, that little toy that you used to play with when you were a kid, you get your fingers stuck inside of there and then you’d have to call your mom because you couldn’t get your fingers out. Think of it like that. But miniaturized for a textile.