Santa Clara, California-based SI-BONE, Inc. has named a new leadership team, with some familiar faces, including Chief Executive Officer Laura Francis, Executive Chairman Jeff Dunn, President Commercial Operations Tony Recupero, and Chief Financial Officer Anshul Maheshwari.
SI-BONE
Founded in 2008, SI-BONE is a medical device company focused on developing implantable devices for the surgical treatment of sacropelvic joint disorders. Just a year after its founding, SI-BONE unveiled the iFuse, a “proprietary minimally invasive surgical implant system” used to fuse the sacroiliac joint to treat chronic lower back pain. Since then, the iFuse has been used by more than 2,000 surgeons in more than 45,000 procedures both in the United States and across the globe.
SI-BONE’s Management Team
SI-BONE’s new leadership team includes some familiar faces as well as some new additions. Since SI-BONE began 13 years ago, Dunn has served as its CEO, President, and Chairman. Dunn will continue to be involved with SI-BONE in his new role as Executive Chairman.
Francis has been with SI-BONE since 2015 when she joined as Chief Financial Officer. Beginning in 2019, she also served in the role of Chief Operating Officer. Now, Francis will lead the company as Chief Executive Officer as well as serve on SI-BONE’s Board of Directors.
Recupero has been with SI-BONE since 2016 when he joined as Chief Commercial Officer. In his new role as President, Commercial Operations he will be responsible for leading all commercial operations including sales, marketing, reimbursement, medical affairs, and international markets.
Maheshwari is new to SI-BONE and has more than 15 years of financial experience. Prior to joining SI-BONE as Chief Financial Officer, Maheshwari served as Varian Medical Systems, Inc.’s Vice President of finance, investor relations and treasurer.
Dunn’s Transition to Executive Chairman
OTW spoke with Dunn and Francis about the leadership transitions. Dunn discussed his experience leading SI-BONE from its beginning and reflected on his proudest accomplishments.
As he reflected, Dunn told OTW, “This is such a team effort when you build a company from when it starts in your house and there’s one of you and then there’s two of you and then you do one surgery in one month and then all of a sudden you’re doing 1,000 in a month or something like that.”
Dunn elaborated to describe to OTW the four things he is most proud of stating, “I think the first thing is that we’ve [SI-BONE] helped about 55,000 patients who were in tremendous pain, these sacropelvic patients. Really by a huge effort in advancing the understanding of the anatomy, the diagnosis, and treatment of people who have sacroiliac joint dysfunction. So, the patient stuff is the one that I’m most proud of I’d say.”
“And we have patients that come in, that we fly into the office just so they can tell their story to the employees and over the last 13 years I never get tired of that. Every time, I’m excited. It brings tears to my eyes. To me that’s the really fun part about if you gotta go to work and you can help people and you can build a business all at the same time, that is really special. I feel very special and I feel very lucky to have had a career where I’ve been able to help a bunch of people.”
Dunn continued, “The second one is obviously building technology that are advanced products like iFuse and iFuse-3D and Bedrock and TORQ [iFuse-TORQ] that deliver this rapid and dramatic and durable results that’s backed up by 95 peer reviewed clinical studies.”
In addition to helping patients and building technology, Dunn also expressed pride in his team. Dunn told OTW, “And then the third one, maybe this is the most important, that we’ve just assembled a tremendous team of people. I get energized by them. I hope they have been energized by me. And I know they’ll be energized by Laura [Francis].”
“Medical is, to me, maybe the most complicated business that there is where you have so many customers, you have patients, you have surgeons, you have the FDA, you have CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services], you have hospitals. And it really takes a tremendous team effort to make all those customers happy and make it all work. Our team is simply remarkable on a common mission.”
Dunn concluded, “And I think finally, we really made the decision to invest in clinical studies. Very aggressively and support that entire effort because I think it’s so important to get it right. It has really resulted in unprecedented support and coverage by the payers. Such that today there are 312 million covered lives and really for the first time in medical device history there are payers that like the clinical evidence so much that they put in exclusive coverage.”
“And today there are 38 payers across the United States and there are more in Europe, for instance the country of France, where they exclusively cover our product because the clinical evidence is so powerful and I love science and I love data and I think if you can really do it right and I think we have done it right as a company, that really feels good.”
Francis’s Transition to Chief Executive Officer
Dunn and Francis have worked together at SI-BONE for the past six years. During OTW’s conversation with Dunn and Francis, Dunn expressed his excitement about Francis taking over as CEO, stating, “Laura [Francis] is already in the seat today and doing a great job and I am very, very excited about the next bunch of years under her leadership.”
Francis echoed Dunn’s enthusiasm and discussed with OTW SI-BONE’s plans for the sacroiliac joint market. A market that SI-BONE believes is a “multi-billion dollar market opportunity based upon the percentage of people that have lower back pain that can be attributed to the SI [sacroiliac] joint.”
Francis told OTW that SI-BONE is the current market leader and plans to further develop the sacroiliac joint market and continue to capture a majority of the market. The first step in this plan, Francis explained, is to expand the SI-BONE sales team. Heading up this effort is Recupero.
Francis elaborated: “Tony [Recupero] has been with a number of different companies in the orthopedic space for his career. And, in particular, he was the VP of sales at Kyphon when they went from zero to 250 million in sales. So he [Recupero] really understands how to grow a sales force and retain a sales force and grow their productivity. So that’s the first thing that we’re focused on, is growing our sales force further.”
Naturally, it follows that if SI-BONE is increasing sales, then there will be an increase in surgeons using SI-BONE’s technology. To that end, the second step in the plan is training more surgeons using SI-BONE technology.
Francis told OTW, “Right now we have a target of around 7,500 surgeons but there are only approximately 1,600 of them in the U.S. that have been trained and treated at least one patient.”
Francis continued, “We have a technology that we call the SI-BONE SImulator™. It provides the opportunity to train surgeons using this virtual system in their offices without radiation but gives them as good or better experience as a cadaver lab. So we’re using that product in order to actually train as many of those 6,000 surgeons that are left that we want to bring up to speed on our technology.”
In addition to training surgeons, the plan also includes “developing new products in the sacropelvic solutions space.” SI-BONE has launched new products recently including the Bedrock technique focused on adult deformity and the iFuse-TORQ.
The iFuse-TORQ was just cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February. According to its press release, the iFuse-TORQ is a “highly differentiated 3D-printed threaded implant, for pelvic trauma and minimally invasive sacroiliac joint fusion applications.”
Finally, SI-BONE will be increasing patient awareness. Francis remarked to OTW, “There is a relatively high awareness of the issue of SI [sacroiliac] joint dysfunction or degeneration, there’s 1.2 million therapeutic injections into the SI joint in any given year, but there are only a little over 10,000 surgical procedures done every single year. So there’s a low awareness of a surgical solution.”
Francis continued, “So we’re [SI-BONE] looking at digital marketing and direct to patient marketing in order to increase that awareness.”
SI-BONE has already demonstrated that it is a leader in the sacroiliac joint market. Moving forward, its leaders have made it clear that SI-BONE has no plans to slow down.
