Soft tissue injuries such as sprains, strains and tendonitis result in nearly 70 million physician office visits a year in the U.S. alone, creating an annual USD$54 billion economic burden to the country. With an aging population expected to increase 50% by 2030 and an average 50% failure rate on such interventions as rotator cuff surgeries, both patients and practitioners are desperate for a better way to ensure a successful recovery from serious soft tissue damage. Ortho Regenerative Technologies (ORTH.C), an emerging Canadian orthobiologics company focused on the American market, strives to answer that call with a novel pipeline of therapeutic solutions. Traditionally, when surgeons attempt a soft tissue repair by injecting Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) or Bone Marrow Aspirate Concentrate (BMAC) to augment and help guide tissue repair, the body attacks the injected material as foreign, removing it well before it can impact healing. Ortho employs chitosan, a sugar derived from the shells of sea creatures such as crabs, lobsters and shrimp, to create a muco-adhesive chitosan-based biopolymer matrix, specifically designed to deploy biologics like PRP and BMAC, keeping them at the injection site long enough to do their job. The company’s proprietary RESTORE technology platform, RESTORE-R has hit clinical stage testing for use in the over 600,000 rotator cuff surgeries carried out each year in the U.S. RESTORE-M, another Ortho product, is being developed to assist in the approximate 1.2 million meniscus surgeries performed in the U.S. every year. RESTORE-M, still in large animal testing, is one step away from clinical trials. Ortho is working on complementary applications in articular cartilage repair, OA pain, other ligaments/tendons as well as nucleus pulposus regeneration. With its recently completed $3.0 million non-dilutive financing, Ortho, is ready for FDA submission and patient enrollment into its rotator cuff repair clinical trials. The global soft tissue repair market is expected to reach $10.73 billion by 2025 and if Ortho Regenerative Technologies continues to hit its milestones, it could potentially grow into a solid opportunity for investors.
