MEDICREA Celebrates 500 UNID Surgeries And Launches Real-Time Support For Patient-Specific Spine Surgery

UNiD^TM Lab Services Collaborate with Spine Surgeons for Pre-operative Planning, Order Fulfillment and Post-Operative Analysis; MEDICREA Achieves More Than 500 UNiD^TM Surgeries Performed Worldwide

LYON, France & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MEDICREA® (Paris:ALMED) (Alternext Paris: FR0004178572-ALMED), the leading medical device company for developing patient-specific solutions for the treatment of spinal conditions) has announced the groundbreaking UNiD Lab Services have been used in more than 500 surgeries worldwide. UNiD™ Lab Services include a real-time support team to surgeons in the pre-operative planning of spinal procedures, order fulfillment for the company’s UNiD™ patient-specific spinal rod and a detailed post-operative analysis.

“We are working to expand the indications-for-use to provide more patients with the opportunity to benefit from UNID™, which is now possible through a variety of new technologies, like 3D printing, big data analysis and other proprietary processes we have developed internally”

With UNiD’s precisely customized rods, surgeons can perform spinal surgery more accurately, efficiently, and safely using the surgeon’s design from UNiD’s pre-operative planning and analysis phase. The patient-specific rods are available in two alloys (Titanium TA6V ELI/Cobalt Chromium) and two diameters (5.5 mm/6 mm), matching global standards. Eliminating the archaic method of manually bending rods in the operating room, UNiD™ provides a unique surgical solution to traditional spinal surgery.

In addition to its patient-specific rods, UNiD™ offers a team of experts trained in X-ray analysis, sagittal alignment, and the latest clinical data in spinal correction, who prepare a series of documents for the surgeon and the designated hospital staff. The pre-operative documents are provided to the surgeon and can be filed directly in the patient’s medical record. The documents are also reviewed at the start of every surgery to align the operating room team on the strategy chosen by the surgeon. Post-operatively, UNiD™ Lab Services provide analysis of each surgical procedure and the surgeon’s case series, including a comparison with normative data to provide the benefit of data analysis to the surgeon and ultimately the patient.

Denys Sournac, Founder, CEO and Chairman of MEDICREA®, states, “The importance of individual sagittal alignment parameters in achieving superior long-term clinical outcomes has been demonstrated by leading research groups in the USA and published in peer-reviewed journals. Despite a growing body of evidence, most surgeons do not take into account the patient’s parameters pre-operatively simply because no appropriate solution was offered by the medical device industry before MEDICREA® introduced the UNiD™ platform and associated services, including the UNiD™ Lab. Now, surgeons can focus on executing their surgical plan without compromise or approximation.”

The UNiD^TM Lab Services enhance MEDICREA’s commitment to the development of personalized implants and surgeon-specific services for patient-specific needs in the treatment of spinal pathologies. The unique ability to collect, centralize and analyze large amounts of anonymous clinical data from surgical centers worldwide helps better understand the correlation between sagittal parameters and clinical outcomes as well as the efficiency of various surgical strategies for differentiating patients.

With the rapid adoption of UNiD™ across the world and overwhelmingly positive feedback from surgeons, MEDICREA’s 500^th surgery milestone with the UNiD™ patient-specific rod is a testament to the the company’s position as an industry innovator. “We expect the continued adoption of this technology to become the standard of care for patients undergoing spinal surgery,” continues Sournac. “At MEDICREA®, we envision that all patients will soon request the complete pre-operative analysis of their spinopelvic parameters, offered by the UNiD™ Lab, to allow their surgeon to thoroughly analyze their condition and plan the appropriate treatment.”

Dr. Peter G. Passias, an Orthopaedic surgeon in New-York, performed the 500th UNiD™ surgery and commented, “I have been using the UNiD™ rod and services consistently over the last year because this fulfills my obligation of means to deliver superior patient outcome through proper planning and respect of sagittal parameters. Bending a straight rod during OR time is a technique of the past and is at best a guess of whether we have obtained our surgical goals. Further it is not accurate, not repeatable and contributes to a loss of surgery time. I suspect other surgeons will continue this trend towards pre-operative customized design of the surgical rods in complex deformity cases.”

MEDICREA^® is also actively working to extend its platform of UNiD™ personalized products, notably into the cervical spine, with more on this later in 2016. “We are working to expand the indications-for-use to provide more patients with the opportunity to benefit from UNID™, which is now possible through a variety of new technologies, like 3D printing, big data analysis and other proprietary processes we have developed internally,” Sournac stated. “It is our mission to deliver personalized spine services and products to surgeons that will result in meaningful improvements to patient care.”

UNiD™ patient-specific rods complement MEDICREA’s PASS LP^® thoraco-lumbar fixation system, present in a worldwide market segment estimated at $3.6 billion. The PASS LP^® system is already used by numerous spine surgeons in 35 countries, especially in the United States where PASS LP^® accounts for the majority of MEDICREA USA Corporation’s sales. In the next months, MEDICREA® plans to complete its PASS LP^® portfolio with a range of tulip screws, the most commonly used screws in thoraco-lumbar fixation surgeries. MEDICREA® will be able to address the needs of surgeons worldwide, anticipating to increase market penetration of its UNiD™ platform.

Next publication: 2015 annual results, on April 6, 2016 (after market)

ABOUT MEDICREA (www.medicrea.com)
The MEDICREA Group specializes in the design, manufacture, and distribution of innovative proprietary technologies devoted exclusively to spinal surgery. Operating in a $10 billion market, MEDICREA’s headquarters are based near Lyon, France with an implant and surgical instrument manufacturing facility located in La Rochelle, France, and four distribution subsidiaries in the USA, the UK, France and Germany.

Partnering with some of the most visionary and creative spine surgeons in France, the UK, and the USA, the products developed and patented by MEDICREA® provide neurosurgeons and orthopedic spine surgeons with new and less-invasive surgical solutions that are faster and easier to implement than traditional techniques.

MEDICREA® has also become a pioneer and global leader in the manufacturing of customized implants for personalized spinal surgery incorporating software analysis of each patient, pre-operative planning of the surgical strategy, and production of customized spinal osteosynthesis rods (UNiD™ rod) and lumbar interbody osteosynthesis cages (UNiD™ ALIF cage) that are made to measure by a 3D printer.

MEDICREA is listed on ALTERNEXT Paris
ISIN: FR 0004178572 – Ticker: ALMED