Q: How will spinal fusion fair? Are there opportunities in the fusion market still?
Michael Veldman: What you’ll see is some incremental improvements in spinal fusion. At the North American Spine Society annual meeting, we saw several titanium coated PEEK devices. Invibio has developed a new material that incorporates Hydroxyapatite into PEEK-OPTIMA, which has almost 70 percent of the interbody device market.
We started with PEEK-OPTIMA as a baseline and looked for areas of possible improvement. Hydroxyapatite is used to improve bone apposition to metal devices such as titanium pedicle screws so we felt that it was logical to create a compound material that combines the strength and imaging advantages of PEEK-OPTIMA with the osteoconductivity of hydroxyapatite.
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