SmartTRAK spotlights Tetrous in an interview at AAOS 2025 in San Diego.
Andy Carter, Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Tetrous, discusses the company’s novel approach to addressing Enthesis Failure Syndrome in an interview with SmartTRAK at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) 2025 Annual Meeting in San Diego.
To learn more about Tetrous and its novel technology, listen to the following video. (21:42 min.) A link to download the transcript of the interview is also provided below.
Hey everybody, it's Andy Knapik, live here at AAOS 2025 in San Diego. Today I'm joined here with a friend, colleague, and someone I've known now for, I guess a couple years, Andy Carter, Founder, Chief Technology Officer of a company called Tetrous, which is really some exciting biologic technology. So I just brought him along. We're going to chat a little bit about it. So Andy, why don't you just tell everybody what it is about Tetrous and what you guys do and why it's so great.
Andy Carter: Thanks for the opportunity. It's a great topic to talk about and I really, really love it. So we started Tetrous a couple of years ago. We spun it out of Theracell, the company that we sold to, ISTO Biologics. They're doing great and taking the technology in the spine and doing various things. But along the way, I read quite a few papers about how demineralized bone matrix materials could influence enthesis repair. And that's getting back to sports medicine, which is my roots and well, my real passion. I looked at these papers and they basically showed that demineralized bone matrix materials could influence the enthesis to heal. A tendon, the enthesis, is the bit between the tendon and the bone. It's the junction. It's how you get load transfer between rigid bone and flexible tendon. It's a biological structure that's very exquisite and unique. You look at the histology and the biologists go into raptures and "wows" about it and whatever.
The fundamentals are that you've got collagen fibers going from the bone through into the tendon. That's what gives you the strength. You see them in the histology with Sharpey's fibers. If you just reattach tendon to bone, you just get scar tissue. Scar tissue is not as strong. Basically, it pulls out and thins and fails with time. So part of the reason that we see so many problems with rotator cuff repair is that nobody's doing anything to heal the enthesis. There was this literature out there saying, ‘Hey, you can use DBM for this,’ but none of the papers showed it in any way that was something that you could see a surgeon being able to use-
Right, a practical form.
AC: There's one group, guys I know very well had used DBM powder. Now DBM powder, you can do it in a rat study and show that it works, but that's not a product. So what we were able to do, one of the clever things about the technology that we developed at Theracell, the fiber technology is, it allows us to ....
Click the button below to download and read the complete transcript of SmartTRAK's interview with Andy Carter, founder and CTO of Tetrous, conducted by Andy Knapik, SmartTRAK Senior Analyst, Soft Tissue Fixation and Arthroscopic Enabling Technologies.
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