BusinessTN

Though Memphis’ burgeoning biotech community may eventually propel the city into the ranks of the elite nationally, there’s still a good deal of distance to cover before that becomes a reality. Nonetheless, one niche of the sector is already shining through: orthopaedics.

In orthopaedics, Memphis’ stature is quite high—that’s the main focus here,” says Richard “Dick” Tarr, president and executive director of the two-year old InMotion Musculoskeletal Institute. An independent nonprofit orthopaedics lab, InMotion was created to provide a nexus in which the range of musculoskeletal-based entities in Memphis—industry, clinical and academic—can collaborate. Backed by Memphis Tomorrow and the Campbell Foundation, the nonprofit received $3.6 million last year from the Assisi Foundation of Memphis and the Plough Foundation to build and staff its laboratory facilities, which opened in February.

Tarr is still trying to fill out the staff. The slow process, he says, is due to InMotion’s highly specialized needs, not the environment. In orthopaedics, there are only two major players.

“Warsaw, Ind., is the leading city, with about 47% of the worldwide market, but Memphis has about 18%,” says Tarr, a 30-year veteran in orthopaedics. “That’s very uncommon. Normally, you’d see it spread out much more, but we’ve done pretty well [recruiting scientists] so far. I’ve hired two PhDs who will run my laboratory: one in biomechanics, the other in biologics solutions. We’re hiring technicians, but the challenge is [finding] clinician scientists—MDs with a clinical practice who also work in a laboratory. Out of 30,000 orthopaedic surgeons in the country, there may be a few hundred of these. It’s a six-month process just to recruit someone.”

To expedite growth, Tarr aligned a small, agile and highly successful board of directors for his lab, anchored by J.R. “Pitt” Hyde III. “[Memphis] Bioworks, Pitt Hyde and the Campbell Foundation,” Tarr says, “they really drove this.”

That message has resounded true enough to entice behemoths like Medtronic and Baptist Memorial Health Care to spend $300,000 each just to affix their names onto InMotion’s research and development and biologics labs respectively, well before InMotion even opened its doors.

Why? It could be because Tarr’s industry, along with the rest of medicine, is positioned to reap an unprecedented, multi-billion dollar bounty from an increasingly fertile field of graying baby boomers.

Many people, not just in America, want to stay active as they grow older,” he says. “But they’re running into the same problems as past generations; their bodies are wearing out. “We can solve those problems,” Tarr asserts, not just referring to plastic devices. “The next great change will be regenerative medicine, or biologic solutions,” he says.

Unfortunately for baby boomers, InMotion and the rest of the orthopaedics industry probably won’t get there in time to help them.

“This is a very conservative field,” Tarr says. “People get improvements, but they’re evolutionary, not revolutionary.”