Badger Medical Collar Founder Shares Updates About the Startup

Avitus Orthopaedics, Inc. received the Most Promising Medical Device Company award at the ninth annual Innovation Summit. The event brings together tech-based entrepreneurs, investors, business executives and service providers and provides a place for them to network and connect to the resources they need.

Innovation Summit Award winner Neil Shah, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Avitus Orthopaedics told Innovation Destination: Hartford about his company and its plans for the future.

IDH: When and why did you start your company?

SHAH: Avitus Orthopaedics was founded in 2011 after Maxim Budyansky (who is the other co-founder) and I completed graduate school at Johns Hopkins University.

The unmet clinical need that we initially set out to solve was brought to us by the founding clinical team, three spine surgeons at Johns Hopkins who we met during clinical rotations as part of our graduate program. The clinical team has helped define the problem, develop a solution and test the product as part of ongoing commercialization activities.

In addition, since the inception of the company, the team continues to investigate and analyze additional unmet clinical needs that can be solved with new cutting-edge technologies developed at Avitus.

IDH: What products or services does your company offer?

SHAH: The company’s flagship product is the Avitus^TM Bone Harvester, which is a surgical instrument that enables orthopaedic and spine surgeons to collect bone graft and bone marrow in a simple, streamlined and minimally invasive manner. This medical device has the potential to shape the current $2.8 billion bone graft industry and provide surgeons with a gold-standard bone graft option for their patients to maximize the quality of clinical outcomes while decreasing healthcare costs.

IDH: What’s your company’s greatest challenge?

SHAH: The company’s greatest challenge is always the challenge it is currently facing. We are strong proponents of learning from others’ past lessons, which is why we have focused a great deal of effort on surrounding ourselves with extremely smart and successful advisors who have faced many of the challenges that we are currently facing and will continue to face.

IDH: Where do you see your company in the next three to five years?

SHAH: Our vision is to develop a technology platform based upon our core technology that can address an array of unmet clinical needs facing our society today.

IDH: Any advice for entrepreneurs or startup business owners?

SHAH: The path between where you are now and where you want to go is not a straight line. Every entrepreneur starts out with a very clear vision of success, but as they start executing, they get pummeled with outside forces that interfere with their plans.

Many of these outside forces can be foreseen, planned for and prevented; but many of these forces are unpredictable and unpreventable. The successful entrepreneur is not the one who is able to plan the best, but the one who is able to change the plans quickly to navigate the barrage of obstacles they will face.