Portland Orthopaedics expands

Medical device company Portland Orthopaedics has expanded into a larger Sydney-based facility to develop and manufacture its new style of hip and knee replacement joints.

Dr Ron Sekel, inventor of the company's Margron Total Hip Replacement System, began engineering it more than eight years ago, after practising as an orthopaedic surgeon for 26 years.

As a professor in engineering at the University of New South Wales, he developed the system in collaborations with CSIRO and Monash University.

"The hip replacement system is an entirely new concept," he said. "It allows people to walk immediately after the surgery. Within 24 hours, the patient can already walk upstairs."

Sekel said his hip replacement method was gentler than traditional hip replacement surgery, and used a novel, patented screw with two pitches, "which go into the bone and lock in much tighter than a nail."

The Margron system is distributed in the US by Portland Orthopaedics. Sekel said the US hip replacement market was potentially worth $1 billion, and he hoped to capture up to 8 per cent of it within the next five years.

Costing up to $12,000 for each large revision hip, and $4000 for the primary hip, the technology is not government subsidised. Nonetheless, Sekel claims there is a huge market.

Backing Sekel's claims are Rothschild and Equity Partners, both coming in as investors at a late stage of development to speed up the system's penetration into the international market.

The company is in the process of gaining approval for the hip replacement system in the European market, and also plans to launch it in Japan.