Hatch Podcast: EP2

– Greg Parranto’s transition from Army combat engineer to CEO of Endeavor Orthopaedics
– The revolutionary technology behind avulsion fracture treatments
– Insights into soft tissue management and how it’s changing orthopaedic care
– Overcoming challenges in bringing medical innovations to market
– The future of orthopaedic treatment and innovation
– Dr. Brent Norris’s contributions to orthopaedics and patient care
– The mission and impact of Endeavor Orthopaedics in the medical field

Greg Parranto is the CEO of Endeavor Orthopaedics, a company dedicated to revolutionizing the treatment of complex bone fractures through innovative medical devices. With a background as an Army combat engineer officer and over a decade of experience in the medical device industry, Greg is passionate about advancing orthopaedic care and improving patient outcomes.

– Learn more about Endeavor Orthopaedics at www.endeavorortho.com.
– Connect with Greg Parranto on LinkedIn: Greg Parranto

Follow Hatch Fairhope on social media for updates, and subscribe to the Hatch Podcast for more conversations with innovators pushing the boundaries of technology and healthcare.

Subscribe & Listen: https://www.hatchfairhope.com/podcast

Intro : 0:01

Hatch. This is the Hatch Podcast, where technology comes to life. A Hatch Fairhope production.

Stephanie: 0:08

At Hatch Fairhope, we’re all about cultivating creativity, driving innovation and accelerating growth. Welcome to the Hatch Podcast. Each episode will bring you inspiring conversations with innovators who are pushing boundaries, solving problems and building the next wave of success. Today, we’re joined by Greg Paranto, ceo of Endeavor Orthopedics, a company that’s revolutionizing how we treat complex bone fractures, with a focus on combining innovative plate and screw technology with soft tissue management into single implant. Greg and his team are making significant strides in improving patient outcomes, particularly in treating challenging periarticular fractures. We’ll dive into the story behind Endeavor’s groundbreaking technology, the challenges of bringing it to market and what the future holds for orthopedic care. So let’s get started. Welcome to Fair Hope, greg.

Greg Parranto : 1:02

Thank you for having me.

Stephanie: 1:04

Let’s just dive right in and talk a little bit about your backstory. Before you connected with Endeavor.

Greg Parranto : 1:09

Well, I grew up in Minnesota and then I went into the Army. So I was in the Army for 12 years a combat engineer officer commanded in Afghanistan. When I got out of the military I joined Synthes down in Houston, texas, as a thoracic sales consultant. We were focused on the rigid fixation of the sternum after open heart surgery and flail chest and the ribs. And I spent 16 years almost 17 years with Synthes. While I was in that role, or after I was done with sales, I moved into to lead global product development and marketing for our maxillofacial portfolio, just dealing with all the bones in the face and in the skull. And while I was in that role, johnson Johnson acquired us.

Greg Parranto : 1:54

When J&J acquired us I thought about moving on to a smaller company and getting into the innovative side. But I really enjoyed J&J. I mean they were tackling some big problems. Obviously it’s a large company with a lot more funding and resources and they continued to challenge me. So I moved into contracting and learned about the breadth of the Debut Synthes portfolio of orthopedics.

Greg Parranto : 2:15

Then I became the national director of foot and ankle sales and after that I became the area vice president for our trauma and extremities line in the Midwest. That was fun, but we weren’t really innovating and driving our new products. We were really managing the business and I kind of missed that product development stage and improving patient care and working with surgeons to develop new products. And so I went back to school, got an MBA from Kellogg Northwestern in Chicago that’s where I live, by the way, is just outside of Chicago and started a search for a smaller, innovative company to join and was very fortunate to find Endeavor Orthopedics at a critical time. They just launched their first product and we’re looking to grow the commercial organization and expand their portfolio products. So that’s how I got here.

Stephanie: 3:04

So tell me a little bit about the history of Endeavor.

Greg Parranto : 3:08

Endeavor has a great history. It starts with Dr Brent Norris down in Tulsa, oklahoma. We worked with him at Depew Synthes on some of our most innovative products and he’s the one who, I wouldn’t say, identified the clinical problem, because dealing with avulsion fractures is a well-known clinical challenge. He’s the one who came up with the solution and really saw the critical aspect of fixing avulsion fractures relied on the effective management of soft tissue. So he came up with our idea. He came up with the solution and decided to go out on his own and found a company to treat avulsion fractures for the average listener who’s not into orthopedics.

Greg Parranto : 3:51

Gotcha.

Stephanie: 3:52

Break that down for us, what that means.

Greg Parranto : 3:53

Absolutely so.

Greg Parranto : 3:54

An avulsion fracture is a bony fracture where one of the bony fragments is attached to a tendon or a ligament, and the challenge with that is it’s relatively straightforward to fix the bony fracture and you hear about people using plates and screws and pins and rods and all this stuff when they break bones, and surgeons are very adept at fixing those broken bones with different means.

Greg Parranto : 4:19

The challenge with avulsion fractures is as soon as you fix it, once you start to mobilize the joint. So our first product is the kneecap. Once you start to bend the knee, your muscles, your quadricep and your patella tendon they start to pull on those bony fragments and so they’re fighting against the repair that the surgeon just created. And so, for example, in the kneecap you have over a 50% reoperation rate because it’s a very difficult fracture to heal successfully. So they put it back together and then, once you start to bend the joint, it’s fighting against it. It causes movement, causes pain, high rate of non-unions and unfortunately it’s a high rate of operation rate. The same thing happens with the elbow and the shoulder and the hip, all of those joints. You have fractures that are attached to tendons and ligaments and you have the same problem throughout the body attached to tendons and ligaments and you have the same problem throughout the body.

Stephanie: 5:14

So does this technology? Is it mostly for injury or also like wear and tear, like knee replacement surgery, like down the road, Like when I’m, you know, 85, is it something I’m going to be losing? Is the technology going to be available for me to get a total knee replacement when I need it? Or hopefully not.

Greg Parranto : 5:31

That’s a great question.

Greg Parranto : 5:32

When we first launched the product for the kneecap, for just example, we were focused on trauma, and so car accidents, bicycle accidents, somebody falling and landing on their knee and fracturing their patella so some sort of a blunt force trauma to your kneecap which causes the fracture, and that is where most patella fracture happens, and that’s what we’re targeting.

Greg Parranto : 5:54

But what we’re finding is it’s very prevalent for total knee surgeries as well. So about 1% to 2% of total knee patients end up fracturing their patella, and that’s because it’s very common in a total knee to put in a polyethylene, a plastic patella that’s underneath the bone and that weakens the bone and for one reason or another they fall or they end up with a fractured patella post-surgery. And we’ve seen quite a few surgeries. We’ve seen our implant used quite frequently on total knee patients. It’s interesting, though A surgeon who does 300 total knees a year might only see three fractured patellas that year. So it’s not a high-volume procedure, but when it happens they don’t have a good solution and they’ve been very pleased with our solution. It’s great feedback for that indication.

Stephanie: 6:49

So is there any kind of thing that’s comparable to it out there now, or what’s being used, or does it always just ultimately end up being another operation?

Greg Parranto : 7:00

Well. So there’s a lot of ways to fix these type of fractures on the market. So, for example, when we talk about the kneecap, which is our first product, you had circlage wires where they wrap wires around the patella. To do that. Then I think standard of care right now is really more like cannulated screws, where you run screws through the kneecap and you use a pretty intricate suturing technique to do a tension band around the patella, not to get too much detail. So there’s other ways to do it.

Greg Parranto : 7:32

What we have is a unique way. There’s no other product on the market that has a sterile plate and screw construct with sutures pre-attached to the plate, so the surgeon can go and fixate the patella and then tether into the tendons in one kit. And the key with is, when you tether into the tendons and you connect them to the plate and screw construct, you’re offloading the deforming forces from the bony fragment onto your metallic implant. So now you can mobilize the joint and that extensor mechanism, those forces coming from those muscles, is transferring through the plate as opposed to through the bone that they just fixed, which decreases the movement and the mobility of that bone, the gapping at the bone, and so it promotes healing and we’re seeing less than a 5% reoperation rate with the procedures we’ve done so far. We’ve done 86 surgeries to date, and so significant improvement from the standard of care on the market today.

Stephanie: 8:30

Talk a little bit about, kind of, where you are in the process as far as bringing it to market.

Greg Parranto : 8:34

Absolutely so. When we talked about the history of the company, they filed IP right off the bat, and so we have IP around the suture plate interface and 13 different patents. And then we got FDA clearance in 2021 for our first product, which is that kneecap product, the Summit Patella plating system. And we’re working on developing products for the elbow. They’re almost at design freeze. The plan is to launch them next year and then we’ll move on to the shoulder and the hip.

Greg Parranto : 9:06

Right now with the one product that’s commercially available we launched it in 2023. And we’re starting to grow that market. Right now, there’s only three employees in the company, so we are in the middle of raising funds. We’re doing a convertible note, which we’re almost closed. We only have about 400,000 left on a $2 million note and then we’ll move on to an $8 million equity round and the purpose of those funds are to enable me to build the commercial organization and hire a VP of sales and then hire some area directors underneath that, to expand our distribution network and then also to accelerate the launch of the rest of the products in our portfolio.

Stephanie: 9:47

So you’ve just gone through the 10-week program, the Hatch Fairhope powered by Bessel Chris Danik, it’s awesome. Can you talk a little bit about that experience and maybe some key takeaways from being a part of the program?

Greg Parranto : 10:12

spent the last 16 years with J&J Depew Synthes, working with a lot of great surgeons and a lot of great people in the healthcare and the orthopedic space, but not necessarily those on the entrepreneurial side in that startup space, and so I was fortunate to be involved in some acquisitions on the acquiring side of companies, but not in that startup space. And so now, being a part of this Hatch Fairhope powered by Bessel Accelerator there’s eight of us and there’s seven other CEOs, and Keith has some great points of contact to help me animate our product I wouldn’t have made those connections if I wasn’t a part of this group.

Stephanie: 10:58

So, looking down the road, what does the future look like for Endeavor?

Greg Parranto : 11:02

The priority right now is raising the funds. Once we raise those funds, it’s going to really get fun. That’s when we’ll ramp up our sales organization and then simultaneously ramp up our product development, and we plan on launching the Electronom plate, like I said, in July of 2025 and follow up with a couple of our other products, and our goal is to grow our sales to about $15 to $20 million in revenue by 2026, early 2027, and then look to exit the company in one of the larger strategics Quite a few out there, the main players. We don’t plan on growing this company to compete with those larger companies. We really see ourselves filling a gap in their portfolios and being a target for acquisition in a few years.

Stephanie: 11:50

So there seem to be— certain qualities that you know entrepreneurs share. What do you think are some of the most important? Like that, you really need to be successful in that space.

Greg Parranto : 12:05

Yeah, I would really say there’s two primary things. First and foremost is just the network of support and the people, especially in the healthcare space. It’s such an intricate space when it comes to regulatory and the IP hurdles, and then just the launch and working with surgeons, working with hospitals. There’s so many different facets of the healthcare ecosystem that it’s very challenging for one person to go it alone, and so I was very fortunate to again work in the healthcare space for 17 years and then also just finishing up that Kellogg MBA. There was a healthcare-focused group there, a lot of entrepreneurial-spirited folks that in healthcare and not in healthcare, and those connections and networks have been invaluable to me. Same thing goes with this Hatch Fairhope Powered by Bessel group. That was a network I met at LSI earlier this year. I was fortunate to be invited to participate in this group and meet those individuals. So I would say, as an entrepreneur, you have to get out and meet as many people as possible and be open to constructive criticism, open to advice and move forward.

Greg Parranto : 13:20

The second thing I would say on the entrepreneurial sphere is you have to be prepared to wear many hats. In J&J we had a lot of different silos. You had folks that were experts in particular fields, and very few people that branched across those areas and were experts in multiple different facets of healthcare. Right now, if you call the 1-800 number on our website, my cell phone rings. I’m covering cases and I’m also, you know, talking to investors. I need to hire some folks, but you wear a lot of hats when you’re an entrepreneur. So there’s no job too small, there’s no job too big. You just have to tackle them all and have a get it done attitude.

Stephanie: 14:01

Well, Greg, I’ve enjoyed sitting down with you today. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us.

Greg Parranto : 14:06

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Outro : 14:09

Hatch. This has been the Hatch Podcast, a production of the Hatch team in Fairhope, alabama. Host Stephanie Glines, producer Tim Scott, executive producer and creator Keith Glines. Visit hatchfairhopecom for more information.