While national and international companies convened in Fort Myers for a celebration of innovation, a global company with a home in Southwest Florida aimed for its share of the spotlight, too.
Arthrex, which already has won four Edison Awards, submitted two recent inventions in trying to achieve its fifth and sixth trophies.
The 37th annual Edison Awards, taking place for the fourth consecutive year in Fort Myers, gave Arthrex founder and President Reinhold Schmieding its Achievement Award in 2021. This year’s Achievement Award recipients will be Laurie Leshin, director of Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, and Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX.
Arthrex designs surgical instruments used in orthopedic and other types of surgeries and has its global headquarters in Collier County, with a manufacturing plant in Ave Maria and a distribution center in south Fort Myers.
Arthrex submitted two new inventions for consideration in this year’s Edison Awards. The SutureLoc implant, the first “knotless, retensionable soft anchor designed for arthroscopic meniscal root repair” in knee surgeries, has been nominated in the Orthopedic and Musculoskeletal Solutions category.
Julia Cuny, originally in the accounting department and now on the product development team, helped create it.
“This is to preserve meniscus,” Cuny said, showing the device in the innovation display area at Arthrex. Meniscus surrounds the knee and helps provide cushion. “We want to make sure that we’re preserving meniscus and doing everything we can to the get your meniscus healed and get back to normal. It helps patients feel normal, faster.
“It’s a very complicated anchor to produce. It’s a whole new mechanism that we developed specifically for this implant.”
The MIS FiberTak Achilles SpeedBridge, a repair implant system, has been nominated in the Surgical Innovations category.
The Edison Awards conclude April 18 with a banquet at Caloosa Sound Convention Center downtown Fort Myers.
“At Arthrex, we pour a lot of heart and soul into these products,” Cuny said. “We really care about what we’re doing. And the why behind why we create this implant is to help surgeons. We want to help people.”
