Jan. 8—ON THE sixth floor of the Brady Sullivan Tower, Bryan Lord talked about the long gestation of a surgical device designed to make sports medicine procedures cheaper and more efficient.

The clean, quiet space had the feel of a company headquarters that didn't look like it got a lot of use. On this particular day Lord was the only one there, a familiar scene in the era of remote working.

Lord and his team at Pristine Surgical got a head start on the hybrid work model. The day we visited Lord in Manchester was in October 2019 — a good five months before the coronavirus pandemic shut down corporate offices and pretty much everything else.

Last week, Pristine Surgical announced it has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market Summit, its single-use arthroscope used for minimally invasive surgeries.

"Now the real business starts — which is taking that device, sharing what its capabilities are to surgeons, to facilities, and really putting this device in their hands so they can deliver ultimately better care to their patients," Lord said Wednesday. "We're really in that respect in the starting blocks."

While the company has had its share of supply chain challenges over the past few years, Lord was already accustomed to working with a team scattered around the globe.

Pristine Surgical's 25-member workforce includes eight people in New Hampshire and others in Tennessee, Florida, California and Oregon.

"Nobody enjoyed the COVID period to be sure, but I would say we were more prepared for it than most, having been founded with the virtual model and the ability to really persevere through the challenges of COVID through that model," said Lord, who took over as CEO of the company in 2015.

Lord was an early investor in Pristine Surgical, which was founded in Chicago in 2011 by two surgeons and a "self-taught" engineer who built the prototype, Lord recalled in a previous interview. The company worked with Dean Kamen's research and development team at DEKA to refine the device.

Like its employee base, Pristine's manufacturing partners are scattered around the globe.

"The primary device, the single-use kit, is assembled in Toronto. The box that the scope connects into — the device we call our image processing unit — is manufactured in Minneapolis," he said.

The company has help overseas, too.

"We also have a strategic partner in South Korea that helps us with some of the more technical, electronic and lens assembly aspects of our device," he said. "We have North American-based assembly and really a global supply chain that we manage to build this device."

Lord doesn't anticipate a surge in hiring — the company's contract manufacturers will ramp up as needed to take care of Pristine's production needs, he said.

"On the sales side of things, we will be using independent reps that are already in the field that are located in the geographies in which we intend to sell," he said. "That having been said, we will certainly increase our headcount consistently over the coming months and years also at the main enterprise level as well."

Pristine Surgical faced longer lead times and minimum order requirements for components during the pandemic but managed to navigate those challenges, Lord said, continuing to be able to procure materials needed for its scopes and image processing units.

"You hear horror stories about automobiles that are sitting in a parking lot because they can't get certain components," he said. "We're fortunate not to have that challenge facing us in large part because of the skill and hard work of our supply chain management."

Pristine Surgical's Summit system updates technology that hasn't changed much since the 1970s. Traditional systems need to be sterilized after each use and need to be serviced after 20 to 40 procedures, Lord said. They are also subject to denigration of the imaging — what the surgeons can see inside the joint through the arthroscope — with increased use.

"What we've been able to do is take components from the global consumer electronics supply chain, components that are made in the millions if not billions worldwide and therefore are able to be purchased at really an economical price and take those and reconfigure them into a surgical device," Lord said.

"With that you're able to get all of the performance and all of the magic you see and carry around in your hand in a smartphone and be able to really take that old technology and bring that into the 21st century with this single-use surgical device."

Mike Cote is senior editor for news and business. Contact him at mcote@unionleader.com or (603) 206-7724.

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