Look, it’s not brain surgery! Seriously, though, it’s spine surgery—and it’s becoming more high tech.
Health tech company Xenco Medical, founded in 2011, has created biomaterial and implant devices that can regenerate bones in patients undergoing spinal and other orthopedic surgeries. The products use a chemical process that builds up proteins to model and grow bone, helping patients heal more effectively after surgery.
The surgical devices are just part of the company’s longitudinal treatment strategy to provide patients with an ongoing and interactive postoperative care plan. Last year, Xenco introduced its TrabeculeX Continuum technology, which combines both surgical devices and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven digital health rehabilitation to heal bones. To date, over 3,180 patients have utilized the treatment, said Xenco founder and CEO Jason Haider.
Once a surgery is completed, the patient begins a “mechanotransduction phase” that harnesses patient activity during rehabilitation and sends biochemical signals to cells that help boost the healing process.
The tech works with Xenco’s TrabeculeX Recovery App, which uses patient data from surgery and creates a physical therapy plan designed to regenerate the bone.
“Every single time that the patient begins to do their physical therapy protocol, it takes functional measurements, so the patient will have to engage with the AI platform to assess their range of motion to see how they’re healing,” Haider told Healthcare Brew.
The remote monitoring app also gives surgeons real-time feedback on a patient’s recovery, he added, so doctors can see how the patient is healing and change exercises to have “continuous bone-forming intervention.”
Without these technologies, patients are more dependent on a surgical procedure to achieve an outcome, but now they can enhance their treatment with digital health tools, Haider said.
Haider wrote in an emailed statement that Xenco’s longitudinal care, compared to just a device on its own, can help avoid “failed spinal fusion,” can help build transparency during rehab that can help with recovery and decrease the risk of infection.
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The bigger picture. This technology is categorized under an emerging field called regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine includes treatments that restore bones, tissues, and organs that need healing due to disease, aging, or other issues. It can include everything from gene and cell therapies to skin cell therapies.
Health systems like Mayo Clinic and Northwestern Medicine have dedicated research centers for regenerative medicine.
The US regenerative medicine market was valued at $20.1 billion in 2024, according to market research firm Nova One Advisor, and is expected to exceed $80 billion by 2033.
Regenerative medicine treatments, like what Xenco offers, are “helping surgery become more efficient, helping surgery become less of a burden on the patient, and decreasing the chance that surgery fails over time,” Najib El Tecle, a spine surgeon at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, told Healthcare Brew.
‘Golden age.’ Haider said that the medical community is at a “dawn of a golden age in regenerative medicine” due to increasing AI use in healthcare.
For example, complex problems like trying to figure out the confirmation of a protein previously took doctoral students five years, El Tecle said, and this new tech can lead to better outcomes for patients.
“Now there are AI models that will give you that result at the end of the hour,” he said. “These innovations are going to exponentially accelerate our quest toward real regenerative medicine.”
In the future, El Tecle said it may be possible to restore the spine to a younger, healthier state, or even prevent aging. But he said we aren’t there yet.
“This is just starting to unfold,” El Tecle said.