Monogram Orthopedics, the startup advancing the future of joint replacement surgery, has attracted 5,000 Series B investors – and almost $1 million – on crowdfunding platform StartEngine.
Aiming to personalize the $19.6 billion joint replacement market through artificial intelligence, robotics, and 3D printing, Monogram Orthopedics is targeting a $34 million raise to scale and bring their technology to market.
The company expects to kick off its unmatched personalized approach with its first Total Knee Arthroplasty implant FDA submission planned for later this year.
To date, innovation in orthopedics has lagged behind many other surgical specialties. While the rise in personalized medicine has made advances in numerous fields, progress in orthopedics remains sluggish, with standardized implants and procedures stubbornly persisting as the standard of care.
Unfortunately, this standard in TKA doesn’t always serve patients, with approximately 100,000 hip and knee replacement failures every year and 36 percent of patients regretting their TKA procedure altogether.
Monogram believes that much of this dissatisfaction and many of these failures and surgical complications can be easily mitigated and are in fact unnecessary with technology advances, such as those they are developing.
Thanks to significant improvements in robotics, innovative new manufacturing techniques like 3D printing of medical grade titanium alloys and new machine learning image processing techniques, opportunities to exploit technology and significantly improve patient quality of life are emerging.
Fifty percent of knee replacements will be performed robotically by 2027, a fivefold increase in less than six years.
Interestingly, all joint replacement procedures using robotic assistance today continue to use “off-the-shelf” implants. A more personalized approach offers the potential to surgically disrupt the orthopedics field. Monogram aims to disrupt the “one-size fits none” model by offering patients an enhanced individualized fit, well suited for each patient’s individual needs.
Dr Doug Unis, a board certified orthopaedic surgeon co-founder and chief medical officer, Monogram Orthopedics and chief of quality improvement at Mount Sinai West, says: “We started Monogram Orthopedics to build a completely different kind of orthopedics company, free of the constraints that many of the large companies face when trying to innovate.
“We are poised to do what no other company has done in the total joint arthroplasty market before – harness technology to build truly personalized implants that fully tap into the power of intelligent robotics.”
Monogram Orthopedics’ proprietary approach to TKA surgeries will address major problems in joint replacement, including mechanical loosening, minimized bone loss, dislocation, ease of revision and fracture.
Using the Monogram software platform and product solution architecture, surgeons will be able to design optimized implants that improve stability and physiological loading.
The company’s research suggests that implants can be inserted into the patient anatomy with more precision and notable improvement. In a laboratory test at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, a procedure performed benchmarking against a competitor’s technology, which is one of the most clinically and commercially successful knees on the market, showed the competitive product had up to 630 percent more micromotion than the Monogram implant place with their surgical robot.3
Backed by a seasoned team of board-certified medical leaders and top technology talent from prestigious educational and medical institutions, Monogram Orthopedics includes executives, engineers, data scientists and advisors from Yale University, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Mount Sinai Health System, Think Surgical, Motional and the Orthopedics Institute for Children, among others.
The company’s crowdfunding campaign is currently underway on StartEngine to allow patients and caregivers to be active participants in the advancement of precision joint replacement surgeries.
More than 1 million knee replacement surgeries are done a year in the United States alone, a figure that is expected to grow to 3.5 million by 2030.
To date, the company has raised over $20 million and is currently raising up to $34 million in its active series-B round.
The use of proceeds will serve to help commercialize technology that meets the massive need for a knee replacement technology that is well suited for active patient lifestyles, with minimized risk for additional surgeries down the line.
To invest in Monogram Orthopedics and shape the future of joint replacement surgery, visit https://www.startengine.com/monogram.
