Joint Preservation Innovations — FDA Clearance & IP Portfolio Design

The Opportunity

Joint Preservation Innovations was founded by orthopedic surgeons with a clear clinical vision: build the first articulating rotary cutting instrument for arthroscopic bone resection. They had deep surgical expertise and a CEO with clear conviction about where the company needed to go. What they wanted alongside it was an embedded executive partner to build the supplier and manufacturing base, design the intellectual property strategy, and carry the regulatory journey from prototype to commercial launch.

Vendor Selection & Supply Chain

Working alongside the CEO, we led sourcing and qualification of the contract manufacturers and component suppliers behind the device — negotiating terms, building redundancy into single-source dependencies, and holding unit economics to a standard that would survive commercial scale. For a precision surgical instrument, vendor selection is a regulatory decision as much as a cost one: manufacturing partners become part of the submission, and changing them late is expensive in both time and capital. The CEO's clinical relationships opened doors with specialty suppliers that a purely financial process would not have reached.

IP Portfolio Design

The CEO's vision for the technology extended well beyond the first product, and we built the intellectual property strategy to match it. Together we took the company from zero issued patents to a 25-patent portfolio, deliberately constructed to protect every application of the articulating rotary cutting technology — spanning arthroscopy, spine, robotics, and adjacent surgical sub-specialties. Our role was to translate his clinical insight into claim architecture and a filing sequence the company could afford. The result is a defensible position across the full technology platform, not a single cleared device.

Regulatory Navigation

Guided JPI through the full regulatory lifecycle — from prototype development through FDA Breakthrough Device Designation to 510(k) clearance in December 2025. The company was subsequently selected for the FDA's Total Product Life Cycle Advisory Program (TAP), offering enhanced collaboration for future product iterations.

Partnering at the Board Level

Much of this work was executed through the boardroom. We built the financial models, IP maps, and milestone reporting that framed each decision, and prepared them so the CEO could carry the strategy to the board in his own voice. Over five years the board came to expect a level of analytical rigor behind every request — and to associate it with his leadership. The best outcome of a fractional engagement is that the operator's standing inside their own company is higher at the end of it than at the start.

The Outcome

The Articulator™ Arthroscopic Bur became the first and only FDA-cleared articulating rotary cutting instrument of its kind. In 2026, JPI won the AANA Lightbulb Award — the Arthroscopy Association of North America's premier innovation recognition. The company is now in its initial commercial launch at select academic medical centers, with future iterations in development for endoscopic spinal procedures and robotic-assisted orthopedic surgery — each already covered by the patent portfolio built alongside the lead program. The award recognized the CEO and the founding surgical team; our part was to build the financial, supply chain, and IP infrastructure that let their clinical insight reach the market.