MAKO Surgical: Navigating Robotics in Orthopedics

All but dead a half a dozen years ago, MAKO Surgical is alive and well with an innovative technology platform that both embraces robotics and looks past it. Key to MAKO's strategy: a focus on unicompartmental knee procedures that are extremely difficult to do manually but, company officials hope, are significantly enabled by its robotic arm platform. If company officials are right, MAKO's robotics system could help explode the unicompartmental segment of the knee market without cannibalizing the total knee replacement segment. This year's AAOS meeting was a kind of coming out party for MAKO, whose major challenge now is convincing surgeons that robotics is more than just an intriguing gadget-it's a critical part of the surgical armamentarium