Jason Haider, CEO, Xenco Medical, shares how to bridge digital health and materials science for longitudinal care with the development of TrabeculeX Continuum.
Xenco Medical
In January of 2019, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services brought a $60 billion program for Medicare and Medicaid patients, called the Connected Care Campaign.
Nearly 90% of hospital readmissions could be prevented by meeting patients where they were virtually, the Connected Care Campaign is used for healthcare innovators to bolster patient outcomes by developing impactful, remote monitoring solutions.
After the paradigm shift that followed the Connected Care Campaign, Xenco Medical Founder and CEO Jason Haider aimed to become the first spinal technology company to harmonise the postoperative episode of remote therapeutic monitoring with the intraoperative phase of biomaterial implantation.
Medical Plastics News asked Jason Haider about his company’s latest technology, the TrabeculeX Continuum.
Is there a focus in Xenco Medical’s technologies on lowering healthcare costs and patient outcomes?
Jason Haider: Well, as an organisation with an outcomes-oriented thrust optimised for the value-based era of healthcare, we’ve devoted ourselves to continually developing technologies that address the entire spectrum of a patient’s surgical experience. Whether it’s been the development of the first glasses-free holographic surgical simulation platform in HoloMedX, our portfolio of disposable, composite polymer spinal implant and instrument systems, or our biomimetic, titanium foam spinal implants, all of our technologies share the common thread of value-based medicine. We have committed ourselves to addressing not just a single instance of intraoperative care but the entire longitudinal journey of every patient. That calling was instrumental in spurring us to develop a bridge that unified the surgical and postoperative phases of our patients’ journeys through the TrabeculeX Continuum.
Could you walk me through the process of developing the TrabeculeX Continuum?
Jason Haider: When we began this development process, it was essential that the two technologies that would bridge the patient’s surgical journey were harmonious. It was for that reason that we began at the sub-micron scale when engineering the TrabeculeX Bioactive Matrix, ensuring that the biomaterial half of the continuum we were creating would be peerless in its orchestration of three-dimensional bone formation. Because the microscopic surface topographies of each granule embedded in our TrabeculeX Bioactive Matrix conduct both the dissolution of damaged bone by osteoclasts and its replacement with newly formed bone by osteoblasts, it was critical to evaluate our biomaterial’s microarchitecture with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy. To allow for robust bone regeneration, calibrating the interplay between the bioactive glass, highly porous beta-tricalcium phosphate, and hydroxyapatite was a critical consideration as well. It was only after we were convinced that our regenerative biomaterial would be the most effective solution in its class that we set our sights on actualising the full vision of the TrabeculeX Continuum.
Could you explain the digital health layer of this technology?
Jason Haider: Treating our patients as partners rather than pathologies has been a guiding tenet for us as a company, and the promise of extending care to implantees long after their surgical procedure was completed was one that we worked tirelessly to fulfill. Developing an asynchronous care platform that directly addressed the postoperative journey of our patients was essential in making this a reality. Because physical therapy has been proven to impact the ultimate surgical success of a patient, anchoring our remote therapeutic platform in recovery exercises that could be monitored by treating surgeons was critical. Our ultimate mission in developing the TrabeculeX Continuum, however, was to create a seamless, uninterrupted link from surgery to full mobility that dissolved the otherwise siloed nature of modern surgical care. Because we resolved to make the greatest impact on public health within our power through the TrabeculeX Continuum, we decided to engineer our biomaterial to be effective not only in the spine but in a patient’s extremities as well.