MassDevice Talks to ConforMIS Founder, CEO

MassDevice has published an interviewed with the founder of ConforMIS, a Burlington, Mass company that developed technology to build custom knee implants. ConforMIS recently raised $50 million in investments, which clearly points at a promising future for the company and its devices, at least as far as investors are concerned.
A snippet from the interview:

MassDevice: Was there a moment when a light bulb went off and you said to yourself, "There’s a better way to do knee implants?"
Philipp Lang: I’m a radiologist by training. I’ve spent the last 20 years or so in imaging, primarily with musculoskeletal disorders. With that background, I’m intimately familiar with some of the fundamental challenges of current implant systems. That’s basically how ConforMIS was born. It’s clinical background married with business background.
The key issue with today’s standard devices is that they come off the shelf, they come typically in six or seven different sizes and they have to fit any patient, irrespective of their body build — if they’re tall or small, if they’re large or petite, when they’re pre-manufactured you have to fit the patient to the implant. Meaning you have to cut away a lot of tissue, primarily bone, in order to fit the patient with the implant.
We’ve taken a fundamentally different approach. We take a CT scan or an MRI scan and we use the data to build a virtual model of that patient, a 3D model of that patient. From that model we make a patient-specific implant that simply resurfaces the bone, preserving most of the bone structure and avoiding the really invasive nature of the traditional devices.

Link: MassDevice Q&A: Philipp Lang
Company homepage: ConforMIS…
Flashbacks: Personalized Bicompartmental Knee Resurfacing System from ConforMIS Gets CE Mark ; Personalized Bicompartmental Knee Implants from ConforMIS Go On Sale; iUni Resurfacing Knee Approved in US, Now Goes to Europe