It sounds like science fiction - using implants to regenerate human tissues that then become one with the body with no need for removal or replacement.
But it's just another day at the office for Tim Smith, chief executive officer of Octane Medical Group, a biotechnology firm that makes regenerative medical products.
Octane's biomaterial is already being used in spinal surgery to repair damage caused by degenerative disc diseases, while its next generation of products will be used to repair knee cartilage or heart valves damaged by diseases such as arterial sclerosis, says Mr. Smith.
The science may have taken decades to perfect, but the company's origins were more a result of timing and lucky positioning than long-term business planning.
Having worked in the orthopedics field since the mid-1990s - much of that time in collaboration with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency - Mr. Smith and his team from a previous company, Millenium Biologix, were studying why astronauts experience a loss in bone density in zero-gravity conditions.
"We were pursuing a combination of new medical technology for orthopedics," he recalls. "As part of that, we got involved in the development of bioreactors which allow us to do very specific technical investigations with cells."
Translation: Mr. Smith was shooting for a solution to a problem in the figurative stars and came across applications on terra firma. As a result, he and partner Ian Grant co-founded Octane Medical Group in 2007 and haven't looked back.
Since 2007, they've doubled their staff to more than 15 from eight, while their stable of products has grown to six from just one. According to Mr. Smith, about 2,500 orthopedic patients have benefited from those products worldwide.
Perhaps more importantly, Octane has been able to forge crucial alliances with leading Canadian universities and technology-commercialization hubs such as the Toronto-based Ontario Centres of Excellence.
It also has negotiated product-licensing deals with major multinational corporations such as the medical technology firm Medtronic Inc., based in Minneapolis.
In the latter case, Octane licenses its patented core technology to Medtronic, which uses it on, for instance, vascular repair and regeneration.
Next up in product development for Mr. Smith: tissue engineering.
"What we're doing here is not only providing the implant but also the cells that are largely responsible for the recovery," he says. "Certain patient populations don't have the necessary cell activity to do a good job of the repair, so we're not only providing the implant, but the cells that can work to allow the repair to take place."
So how, exactly, has an eight-person biotech startup from Kingston parlayed its tissue regeneration wizardry into international success? The answer, Mr. Smith says, has a great deal to do with its business model and focus.
What have been the greatest scientific and business barriers to gaining traction in this market?
We're working in a field where the product has to work in harmony with the body, and a lot of these processes aren't fully understood by the scientific community. We're trying to develop new products utilizing processes that are just now being discovered. It takes a lot of development time to fully understand how your product performs its biological role and then to optimize it so you get the best performance.
From a business perspective, regulatory hurdles are always a challenge. That's led us to build comprehensive data packages around how these products work, which are then reviewed in detail by the regulatory agencies. Marketing and education is also a challenge - we leave that to our partners.
What do Octane's experiences say about the convergence of health care and IT?
If you were to go back in time and look at what a typical biomaterials company looked like in the mid-1990s, it would be people predominantly involved in chemistry. Here at Octane, we need to have experts in many fields.
