Career-long veterans of the Minnesota medical device industry, Christine Horton and Britt Norton were laid off from RayMedica, a Bloomington-based spinal device manufacturer (now part of New York–based Centinel Spine), in April 2005. “Having spent a lot of time in watching surgeries and understanding the emerging spine market, we looked at the layoffs as an opportunity,” says Horton, who had been the company’s director of marketing.
Recognizing a need in the industry, Horton and Norton took a distinctive approach in founding Minnetonka-based CoreSpine Technologies in June 2005. They didn’t have a technology in mind when they left RayMedica, “so we asked a lot of surgeons what they would like to see,” recalls Norton, who’d served as RayMedica’s vice president of research and development. “It was a development in solving a problem as opposed to starting with a solution and looking for a problem to solve, which is what some companies do. We think we did it the right way.”
The problem the pair solved was creating a device to completely remove the nucleus—the material inside the disc, which provides cushioning between the vertebrae—to make way for a properly positioned implant in the lower back (lumbar) region during a minimally invasive fusion procedure. “The implant enables bone to grow across the disc and get rid of the patient’s back pain,” Norton says. “The challenge is trying to get all that degenerated material out, and there’s a lot of it, through smaller and smaller holes.”
Before moving into their own office space in October 2005, Horton and Norton found a convenient place to set up shop. “Prior to moving into our offices, we had a nice little table at Caribou Coffee in Eden Prairie where many drawings and notes were taken on napkins,” Horton says with a laugh.
The product that the duo launched was based on a less invasive surgical approach. In traditional open spinal surgery, physicians are able to remove 75 to 80 percent of the nucleus using a ronguer, a sharp-edged, stainless steel surgical instrument that was introduced in the U.S. nearly a century ago. In a MISS (minimally invasive spinal surgery) procedure, however, that number drops to less than 50 percent. Nucleus material left in the disc can prevent a complete fusion.
Based on input from physicians, Horton and Norton developed a tissue-selective mechanical device used for nucleus removal and filed their first patent in August 2005. CoreSpine’s flagship product, the Xtend-ST, prepares the spinal disc for minimally invasive fusion devices and other emerging spine technologies. According to CoreSpine, it can potentially remove 90 percent of the nucleus during a MISS procedure.
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