InMotion's $3.6 million in grants signals nod for local orthopedics industry

by Andy Meek | The Daily News | Thursday, June 1, 2006

Richard Tarr once told an Associated Press reporter that competition among orthopedics companies in Warsaw, Ind. - the nationwide hub of the industry - is so intense executives like him have to watch what they say even when going out to dinner, lest someone overhear an otherwise closely guarded company secret.

Warsaw, which sits about 120 miles east of Chicago and has a population of about 12,700 people, controls almost half of the worldwide revenue of the $15 billion orthopedics industry. The local airport stays packed with corporate jets ferrying executives, surgeons and anyone else involved in the cutting-edge industry.

And the city, really, is where one must turn to understand why a pair of grants announced last week to benefit a nonprofit orthopedics laboratory almost 600 miles away in Memphis is a big deal.

Making waves

For starters, Warsaw is where Tarr worked for some 20 years as an executive at DePuy Orthopedics Inc., one of the first major commercial firms in the industry. A few decades and a couple of career moves later, Tarr now is the executive director at the InMotion Musculoskeletal Institute in Memphis, a new startup laboratory in a city that has quietly become the nation's second-largest producer of orthopedics devices.

"A lot of people are having a hard time understanding Memphis as this potential power in orthopedics medicine," said Chris Przybyszewski, director of grants for InMotion. "And we keep telling people we're already a power in orthopedics."

Last week, two Memphis charitable foundations announced they would pony up $3.6 million over three years to give a boost to Tarr's new laboratory. The two groups are the Assisi and Plough foundations - and the $3.1 million contribution by Plough is one of the largest it's ever given in the group's 46-year history.

The money will be used to build InMotion's laboratory and hire its first major research personnel. The group will be relocating from an office and two cubicles inside the Campbell Foundation at 1211 Union Ave. to the Memphis Bioworks Foundation building at 20 S. Dudley St.

"This is something that's going to make a lot of waves in the next couple of months," Przybyszewski said.

The mother of invention

The inspiration for the grant award - as well as Memphis' new status as a fledgling orthopedics hub - can be traced all the way back to Warsaw and to a salesman in the late 19th century who revolutionized the way fractures were treated.

In 1895, Revra DePuy built his namesake company around the innovation of using wire splints instead of the more common wooden barrel staves. Thus, the company that's reportedly the oldest manufacturer of orthopedics implants in the United States was born.

From there, the ballet of new business activity continued, much of it drifting down to Memphis. Don Richards, a Memphis-area sales representative for DePuy, struck out on his own in the 1930s and opened his orthopedics venture, Richards Manufacturing, in Memphis.

Frank Wright, a sales rep for Richards, left that company in 1950 and started Wright Manufacturing, which ultimately became Wright Medical Group Inc. - one of the largest medical device producers in Memphis today. Smith & Nephew bought Richards outright in the 1980s.

Throughout the orthopedics industry as it exists today, Memphis connections stretch all the way back to that one small town in northeast Indiana. The spinal division of Medtronic Inc., Medtronic Sofamor Danek, is headquartered in Memphis, and Medtronic has a large manufacturing plant in Warsaw.

One of the reasons the industry has such a basic family tree is the work is so specialized and technical that it's the same people who are shifting from company to company.

On the map

In Memphis, there are examples aplenty. Tarr was the head of the research and development group at DePuy at the same time Peter Wehrly - today a top Medtronic executive in Memphis - worked in the company's marketing department. Jon Serbousek, today a vice president and general manager at Medtronic, got his first job in Warsaw from Tarr.

"You'll see people moving from DePuy down to Memphis to go to either Richards or Medtronic," Tarr said. "When I moved to town, I probably immediately knew 30 people that had been previously hired and worked at DePuy."

What all that means is Memphis has a leg up in establishing itself as a player in the orthopedics market, more so than in other industries in which the city is maneuvering to establish itself.

And now - in addition to being in a position to capture existing industry talent and build on the industry's tight-knit history - InMotion's grants will help fund one of the most hard-to-resist temptations for scientists and researchers who might to come to Memphis: new lab space.

"(Before InMotion) there was not much orthopedic research being done in Memphis, besides what was being done by the industry, in-house," Tarr said. "Most of the work was going outside the Memphis area.

"We're here to help bridge that gap. We're a private, independent, not-for-profit institute that's going to collaborate with both the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and the University of Memphis."

He said the Plough Foundation money would be used to fund three new staff positions, with the Assisi Foundation money going toward the building of InMotion's office and lab space.

Which goes to show that, if Warsaw is the birthplace of the nation's orthopedics industry, Memphis is now home to its extended family.

"And at InMotion," Tarr said, "our vision is to really put Memphis on the map."