Breaking up isn’t so hard to do, it seems. Just two years after spinning off its consumer products as Kenvue Inc., Johnson & Johnson aims to part ways with its orthopedics unit, which will take up the Depuy Synthes name first created when Synthes Inc. married into the J&J Depuy ortho unit in 2012 for a tidy sum of $19.7 billion. Depuy was itself acquired in 1998.
Trendlines Group Ltd. reported the acquisition of its portfolio company Orthospin Ltd. by Synthes GmbH, a division of Depuy Synthes, the orthopedics company of Johnson & Johnson (J&J), for $79.5 million in cash. Johnson & Johnson’s involvement in the company goes back to July 2018, when J&J Innovation (JJDC) led the company’s series A round.
Roughly four years after Intuitive Surgical Inc. petitioned for an inter partes review for a patent owned by Ethicon Endo-Surgery Inc., the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) finding that the first 14 claims in Ethicon’s 9,585,658 patent are invalid. While the fate of two other claims are still up in the air pending remand to the PTAB, the net effect of the hearing was significantly damaging to an Ethicon patent for surgical staplers that has been in place for only four years.
Johnson & Johnson has been looking to make a big splash in robotics. Now, its Depuy Synthes unit has made progress on this front, gaining U.S. FDA clearance for the Velys robotic-assisted solution designed for use with the Attune total knee system. The solution aims to help simplify surgeons’ existing workflow around total knee replacement.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a bump in the road for developers of digital surgical systems that include robotics, but the technology is still in demand. That was the message from industry leaders at the Advanced Medical Technology Association’s Virtual Medtech Conference.
Israeli startup Zebra Medical Vision Ltd. has partnered with Johnson & Johnson’s Depuy Synthes to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms to reduce the costs and radiation risks associated with imaging to prepare for orthopedic surgery.
