ARLINGTON, Tenn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Wright Medical Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: WMGI), a global orthopaedic medical device company, announced today the commercial release of the EVOLVE® Elbow Plating System (EPS). Designed by a team of leading elbow surgeons, the EVOLVE® EPS is an anatomic plating system designed to treat fractures of the distal humerus and proximal ulna.
“The EVOLVE® EPS bolsters our EVOLVE® product family and significantly strengthens our elbow product offering.”
Composed of polished stainless steel, the system was designed to accurately match the patient anatomy to reduce the need for intra-operative bending while providing a low profile design to minimize post-operative irritation. All plates incorporate Wright’s advanced ORTHOLOC™ Polyaxial Locking technology which allows the surgeon to place screws in the best possible trajectory and then solidly lock the screw to the plate providing greater stability.
Dr. Graham King of London, ON, Canada comments, “The elbow has very little soft tissue enclosing it and, in many cases, my patients require hardware removal due to discomfort from thick plates and prominent screws. EVOLVE® EPS addresses this issue through an anatomic low profile plate and screw design. In addition, stainless steel has been shown to be less binding than titanium and, as a result, EVOLVE® EPS plates and screws are designed to be much easier to retrieve when hardware removal is required.”
“There are well over 200,000 elbow fractures each year involving the distal humerus, proximal ulna and proximal radius with a significant percentage requiring surgical intervention,” notes Eric E. Gay, Wright’s Senior Director of Upper Extremity and Biologics. “The EVOLVE® EPS bolsters our EVOLVE® product family and significantly strengthens our elbow product offering.”
The EVOLVE® Elbow Plating System is the latest addition to the EVOLVE® family of elbow products, which includes the market-leading EVOLVE® Modular Radial Head and the EVOLVE® Radial Head Plate, which address fractures of the proximal radius. Other Wright upper extremity products include the SORBIE-QUESTOR™ Total Elbow System, MICRONAIL® Intramedullary Distal Radius Fixation System, RAYHACK® Osteotomy Systems, Swanson® Fingers and Hunter Tendon Rods.
Wright Medical Group, Inc. is a global orthopaedic medical device company and a leading provider of surgical solutions for the foot and ankle market. The Company specializes in the design, manufacture and marketing of devices and biologic products for extremity, hip and knee repair and reconstruction. The Company has been in business for 60 years and markets its products in over 60 countries worldwide. For more information about Wright Medical, visit the Company’s website at www.wmt.com.
This press release contains “forward-looking statements” as defined under U.S. federal securities laws. These statements reflect management’s current knowledge, assumptions, beliefs, estimates, and expectations and express management’s current views of future performance, results, and trends and may be identified by their use of terms such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “predict,” “project,” “will,” and other similar terms. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to materially differ from those described in the forward-looking statements.Such risks and uncertainties include the impact of Wright’s settlement of the federal investigation into Wright’s consulting arrangements with orthopaedic surgeons relating to its hip and knee products in the United States, including Wright’s compliance with a Deferred Prosecution Agreement through September 2011 and a Corporate Integrity Agreement through September 2015, and those risks and uncertainties discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (including those described in Item 1A of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2009, under the heading, “Risk Factors” and in Item 1A of Part II of our 10-Qs filed during 2010). Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Such statements are made as of the date of this press release, and we undertake no obligation to update such statements after this date.
