Oh, THAT’s What Surgeons Are Saying
“In the early years of my spine career, I came to realize that surgeons express their needs in a very specific way. If you are in industry and can translate what surgeons have in mind into a usable product, then you are way ahead of the competition.”
“For example,” says Lavigne, “when we started LDR we came up with the idea to develop a cervical disc. Most of my orthopedic and neurosurgeon friends said, ‘We may not need that for the cervical spine. Fusion works just fine.’ By listening closely to them we could see a huge difference between ‘it works’ and what they actually wanted to accomplish. Yes, fusion had a high chance for success, but the consequences of fusion were not what they wanted.”
“They wanted to remove the pain, but they didn’t want to leave the person incapable of moving. When we went back to them and said that we were not changing the clinical indications but were keeping the mobility of the cervical spine they said, ‘You might have something here.’”
The First Surgery
Lavigne recalls the first surgery in 2004, “The patient did very well, the news spread and we had more and more surgeons calling. Fortunately, we already had lots of connections with key opinion leaders and they recognized that we were spine experts. Non-fusion was a hot topic at the time, but most surgeons had never trained on non-fusion technology, so they had lots of questions. We had some answers…and when we didn’t, we were able to connect inexperienced and experienced surgeons.”
Emphasizing that training was always a major investment at LDR, Lavigne notes, “We wanted surgeons to not only understand the concept of our products, but everything around them—the clinical indications, patient selection, protocol during and after surgery, as well as follow up.”
In 2005 Christophe Lavigne was told by an investor, “You should come to the U.S. It would be better for the company. Just stay for 12 months and then you can go back to France.”
“That’s the way I ‘sold’ it to my wife…but we came and never left.”
Austin, Texas
Settling into this music town in 2006, the Lavigne family took a while to get their bearings. “None of us—not our 8- or 10-year-olds or my wife—spoke any English…and even less American with a Texan accent. But we had tutors and I had my music. I played during that time to refresh my brain…because when you play music you don’t think about anything else.”
With LDR having experienced such great success, it may seem difficult to narrow things down to several milestones. But two things stand out in Christophe Lavigne’s mind. “The Mobi-C approval by the FDA was a huge accomplishment that represented 13 years’ of work. It was especially incredible with the superiority claim that we obtained for a two-level indication. We were confident that it worked, but you never know with an IDE [investigational device exemption] because, for example, maybe one research center is bad at patient selection.”
The second highlight, says Lavigne, was going public on the stock market. “LDR began in a twenty square meter facility in a little town with three employees. Years later we were standing at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square, ringing the famous bell.”
