The tour began with a hairy leg prised open along the shinbone. A woman steadied this limb on a surgical table as a man repeatedly clanked a medical mallet near its foot. Neither were doctors; they were a sales manager and sales rep trainee inserting a titanium tibial transplant into a donated severed cadaver.
“In orthopedics, it’s like construction,” Ken Gall, chief commercial officer and cofounder of restord3D, said over the banging.
Gall’s company sells customized ankle, knee, hip and shoulder joints forged by 3D printer lasers inside Research Triangle Park. Spun out of a Duke University lab eight years ago, restor3D today has several hundred employees between its Boston office and Morrisville headquarters and an annual revenue approaching $90 million. Its printed joints, Gall told The News & Observer during a recent visit to restor3D’s local site, have touched more than 150 bones and been used by more than 650 surgeons.
After exiting the testing room with the leg, Gall showed off a finished titanium piece capable of supporting a full ton once a bone grows around its porous frame. “You can’t make this with normal manufacturing,” he said…