Jared Ament, MD, strives to go beyond standard innovation in spine surgery and unlock new ways of thinking about care. But he said he’s faced some hurdles in spreading the word about his work.
In 2025, Dr. Ament alongside Amir Vokshoor, MD, performed the first clinical 360-degree spine procedure combining Premia Spine’s Tops and Centinel Spine Prodisc-L implants as a fusion alternative.
Since then, Dr. Ament said he’s doing a couple of these cases each month, and the biggest constraint comes from finances. However he said he’s hopeful about an ongoing trial and early data.
“We have an ongoing IRB-approved clinical trial now that opened it up to more than just our site,” he said. “It’s called multicentered, and we have a few papers published about the early success of it. We’re hoping to get 30 patients with two years of follow-up by the end of the year, and that will be when we submit our bigger publication.”
Some of his trial patients have two-year follow-up, and the early data shows the devices are working together.
“We use a proprietary calibration tool designed to ensure motion is physiologic and normal across both devices,” Dr. Ament said. “Then we’re also collaborating with the Cleveland Clinic, and they’re doing biomechanical testing in their lab on two gathers simultaneously to look at some of the constraints and biomechanical implications … The early results for the patients have been overwhelmingly positive. These patients are skiing, fencing, jogging, swimming and golfing, with extremely fast trajectories. And short and long-term follow up has shown stability, motion preservation of varying degrees and the nuances that we’re working on.”
Despite his success with 360-degree spinal fusions, Dr. Ament said he and his clinical partner still feel a “persistent stigma” with their work.
“Everyone’s like, ‘I can’t believe you’re not fusing these cases,'” he said. “We’re obviously doing this responsibly with the right oversight and the right ethics involved. My short term goals are really to try to get as much academic conversation and as much exposure as possible, and it’s been tough because a lot of the major conferences are flat out rejecting our series and our data.”
Dr. Ament said while there’s some conversation going on around the procedure, he wishes more communities would be open to discussions. He said the key will be discussing the data and the implications of results.
“It’s so easy to like the status quo,” he said. “It’s so easy to say, ‘OK, we have fusion technology. We have expandable technology. Let’s look at the next biologic to make the fusion better. But I think that that’s the wrong approach. I think the right approach is really reinventing the wheel and asking, ‘Why are we looking at solving this problem with such archaic ideologies?’ We need to think outside of the box and think how to do better.”
