Tom Afzal
In 2003, with $600,000 in seed funds, Tom Afzal started Spinal Kinetics (acquired by Orthofix in 2017 for just over $100 million) to bring to market the idea that a spinal implant could, in fact, mimic natural disc motion. The original technology was licensed from Stanford University. Afzal’s engineering team at Spinal Kinetics developed its current design.
Tom achieved first-in-man M6 implant 16 months after funding the company. By 2017, two years before FDA approved the implant for sale in the U.S., he had sold 45,000 M6 cervical and lumbar disc’s in the international markets.
Tom led his company through product development, regulatory approval in Europe, a sale to Orthofix and more trials and tribulations than we can recount on these pages.
We called him to see how this news felt. We could hear him smile over the phone.
But the first words out of his mouth were, “The team did a great job.”
His team, Tom explained to OTW had been together with him for practically the entire 15 years. He had, he explained, almost no employee turnover over a decade and a half—an impressive track record in any industry, but especially in the medical technology industry in the middle of Silicon Valley.
Tom has spent half of his work-life in the cardiovascular industry and the other half in orthopedics. His start in the world of implants and devices came with American Hospital Supply Corp. His start in orthopedics came with Sulzer Orthopedics.
Tom Fogarty, the legendary Silicon Valley healthcare investor, backed Tom on a couple of ventures, including Spinal Kinetics. In all, Tom has been a senior executive in eight start-up companies and as a founder and CEO in four of them.
Today, he is the general manager of Orthofix’s Motion Preservation business.
M6 is now sold in 20 countries. It holds the #1 market share in virtually every market.
And, backed by a team with almost 16 years’ experience with this implant, it is now available in the United States.
