The announcement last month that Stryker Corp. has agreed to acquire - NJ-based SpineCore Inc. [See Deal] for an estimated $350 million makes the orthopedics giant the third company in the last eighteen months to place a bet on the promising field of disc replacement—and the third willing to pay handsomely for the opportunity--following similarly-sized deals by Synthes-Stratec for Spine Solutions Inc. [See Deal] and Johnson & Johnson 's DePuy AcroMed Inc. for Link Spine Group Inc. [See Deal], both in 2003. Whether disc replacement as a therapy justifies the more than $1 billion that these three deals have fetched remains to be seen. But there's no greater vote of confidence for a technology that has been a long time in coming.
As noted in US Markets for Adjunctive and Non-Fusion Spine Technologies, a report produced by Health Research International and distributed...