HyperFlex Medical is developing a bone-preserving solution for bunion correction designed to expand treatment options between conservative care and traditional surgery.
HyperFlex Medical is a medical technology company developing a bone-preserving approach to bunion correction. Its proprietary soft tissue-based implant system is designed to realign the first metatarsophalangeal joint without cutting or fusing bone, with the goal of reducing recovery time while preserving native anatomy.
In a recent interview with SmartTRAK, Dr. Josef Geldwert, Founder and Chief Medical Officer, and Bob Peterhans, CEO of HyperFlex Medical, discuss the clinical rationale behind the HyperFlex system, patient selection, early commercialization efforts, reimbursement, and the company's strategy for expanding adoption across hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs).
To find out more, click on the following video (19:03 min). A link to download a complete transcript of the interview is also provided below.
Interview Transcript
Hi everyone. This is Nick with SmartTRAK. I'm a extremity and trauma orthopedic analyst, and I'm here with Dr. Geldwert and Bob from HyperFlex Medical. How are you doing today?
Dr. Josef Geldwert: Great, thanks.
Bob Peterhans: Great. Thanks for having us, Nick.
Dr. Geldwert, before we get into the interview, I would love to ask you about your background and inception of HyperFlex Medical and how it came about.
JG: I'm a podiatric surgeon, been in practice for over 40 years, both with an academic position at Mount Sinai Medical School in the Department of Orthopedics, board certified foot and ankle surgeon, also a sports medicine fellow and the podiatrist for the US Open Tennis tournament, and have performed thousands of bunion surgeries over my career. So HyperFlex came about because I found that most of the procedures that we were doing were either cutting bone or fusing bone, which were very invasive, required significant recovery time, often limited patient's activity for months. And more importantly, they introduced risk and irreversibility. So about 12, 13 years ago, I started doing a procedure that was soft tissue-based that was a suture button device that tethered the first and second metatarsals together and successfully corrected about 75% of the bunions that I performed. But in about 25% of the cases, it created new issues and new problems like stress fractures of the second metatarsal.
So I was really pleased with the successful results that I got, but obviously not pleased with the complications. And I thought that there would be a better way to approach the problem. And we started engineering and designing a device that would capture the successes of the suture button device and eliminate its complications. It is a device that didn't require removing or permanently altering healthy bone when most of the problems in many bunion cases is really a soft tissue and a joint alignment issue. So I wanted a solution that could correct the deformity without sacrificing bone stock and that could allow patients to get back to their lives far more quickly.
And then Bob, can you give me a little background about yourself and how you got involved with HyperFlex Medical now as the CEO?
BP: Yeah, absolutely. My background is medical device for over 30 years. Started out with large companies. I worked for GE Medical for a number of years, also Siemens and Phillips in the past. But the last 10 years I've been working more with startups. And one of the companies I was involved with was called Factor 7 Medical, where we did fractional leadership for different companies. And one of them was a company by the name of FootBridge at the time where I became the interim CEO and then eventually migrated that into a full-time CEO role and bringing the product out to market and getting us to where we are now.
I would love to get started. And Dr. Geldwert, I think you may have answered this first question, but I'm going to go ahead and ask it again anyway. So what unmet need in bunion care led to the development of HyperFlex and what shortcomings of existing treatment options were you seeking to address?
JG: Yeah. We know bunions are incredibly common. They affect probably a third of the adult population, but yet the surgical options available to patients haven't really changed dramatically in decades. So the traditional approaches, whether that's a distal osteotomy like an Austin Chevron procedure or a more proximal correction like a Lapidus fusion, they all share a common problem. They're invasive, require a lot of recovery time. They limit patient's activity for months. They're very painful procedures. So sort of kept on asking myself ....
Interested in learning how this innovative technique corrects bunions while preserving bone? Click the button below to download and read the full transcript of the joint interview of Hyperflex’s CEO and CFO with SmartTRAK’s Nick Fitzpatrick, Associate Market Analyst – Orthopedics. 
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