John Barrett, born in Cleveland, Ohio, and armed with degrees in mathematics and economics, grew up to become a successful medical device entrepreneur. Over his 25-year career, Barrett has been a Johnny Appleseed of technology, planting multiple groundbreaking surgical technology seeds which have grown and matured into incredibly fruitful businesses. Barrett is as passionate about orthopedic innovation as ever and he is working on the next generation technologies.
Here is Barrett’s journey and, most importantly, what his latest game changing technologies and companies are.
Education and Early Work
Barrett grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and left to attend the University of Virginia, graduating with degrees in mathematics and economics. He later moved to California and earned an MBA from University of California Los Angeles. “The first part of my career, I was in the cardiovascular side of the business, where I got a chance to work for a couple of great companies including Baxter and then Abbott Vascular.”
Barrett cut his teeth at Perclose, the legendary startup that innovated a method for controlling femoral artery bleeding during angioplasty and stent procedures. Perclose was later bought by Abbott and it was Barrett’s first experience working with a great company that was built up to be acquired by a larger company. Barrett was involved with the development of Perclose’s closure devices. Perclose’s device became the standard for millions of angioplasty procedures—because effectively controlling femoral artery bleeding was a huge unmet clinical need.
Like many other cardiovascular executives in the late 1990s, early 2000s, Barrett heard the siren call of sleepy orthopedics where there were many unsolved, interesting clinical problems where his experience in cardiovascular could be a game changer. During this time, Barrett engaged with several top orthopedic surgeons and began to learn the clinical issues that bedeviled surgeons. Eventually, Barrett and his new spine surgery colleagues decided “we wanted to start a company.”
CoAlign Innovations was the result in 2007-2008. The team quickly identified a need for expandable interbody technologies for fusion cases. Barrett told OTW that while today there are maybe 20 companies pursuing this work, CoAlign was one of the first. “That was a really fun company,” said Barrett. “We had a great team.”
The type of expandable interbody technology Barrett and the team were exploring would eventually become a standard in the field. Of course, CoAlign went through the now familiar journey of raising funds, developing prototypes, testing, testing, testing, managing the regulatory gauntlet and, again, a successful commercial launch. It took all of $20 million in funding to create the team and the product. CoAlign was eventually bought by Stryker in 2014.
Of course, Barrett teed up yet another new technology company.
I would clarify that John Barrett is a co-Founder of ZKR Ortho. The lead physician is Jeff Halbrecht.
https://zkrortho.com