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Lazurite, formerly Indago, has a simple mission: Solve impossible problems to improve people’s lives. Their first product, the ArthroFree wireless surgical camera system, is designed to eliminate the hazards of fiber-optic cables while delivering energy efficiency in the operating room.
Eugene Malinskiy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lazurite, which he co-founded in 2015. Coming from a variety of healthcare-related roles, Malinskiy shared insight on his career and the orthopedic industry.
Why and how did you get into orthopedics?
I’ve always had a dual path in life. On the one hand, I like working with my hands. I have a knack for computers. I had a couple of IT companies in the past that I started and ran and then exited. My first company was at 16, so I’ve always had this entrepreneurial technology focus in my life, and then I’ve also had a biomedical side. My undergraduate degree was in chemistry at John Carroll University. I was pre-med; I thought I was going to go to medical school — I was wrong. Throughout my life, these things have been mostly parallel but then have also sometimes come together.
I am also an EMT. I’ve been in ambulances, operating rooms and ICUs long before I started doing this work. I was able to bring this dual-track history to Dragon ID, a medical device consulting firm that I founded in 2012. But a few years in, I realized that as consultants, we were doing a lot of work for other people. None of it was ultimately ours.
While on a project with a client, I saw an incident in an orthopedic operating room where they were setting up for surgery. A PA tripped and fell over cables that are really common in every minimally invasive procedure. It was bad; she was injured. They had to scrub the surgery and pull the patient out. When I saw the incident, it made me think, “I want to do my own thing, and I have an idea of what that could be,” which was making a wireless system to get rid of those cables.
That led to the start of what is now Lazurite. I took our early ideas to physicians across the country, and they said they’ve been waiting for something like this for 10, 15, 20 years. We did more prototypes, started putting a team together, and raised 80% of our seed round from orthopedic physicians from all over the U.S.
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing right now?
The common answer is always time, money and expertise. Raising money always takes more time and effort than anybody appreciates. We ran into engineering challenges that turned fortuitous because now we have patents on unique pieces of technology. But crossing the bridges initially on those engineering challenges took twice as long and cost twice as much as we anticipated.
We have a lot of grit here in the Midwest. You just have to buckle down and do the work, even if that means you’re doing it yourself. It’s a lot of long days, long nights, calling on your contacts, doing the demos, making every effort.
What problems are you trying to solve with your current products and those in your pipeline?
ArthroFree solves the wireless challenge, which makes surgery safer because you don’t have the trip and fall risk, and you eliminate a lot of the issues around sterilization. But what we also saw, which is fundamental because it’s about half of our patent portfolio, and we see a very big future in it, is actually the light source. We have unique lighting technology; it is a non-LED light source that is far more efficient than the equivalent LED. Current surgeries use a big giant box that takes about 400 to 500 watts; our light engine draws about 4 watts. It’s a 100x reduction in the power draw of our system. With our system, you physically cannot set something on fire — it doesn’t get hot enough. Safety is the number one problem we solve for, and closely following is the ease by which physicians can do their work.
What excites you most about the future of orthopedics?
I am very happy to start seeing a lot more focus being put not just on treating patients, but on AI and machine learning and preventative medicine. We’ve had biologics for a long time, but I think we’re starting to get to a maturity point in biologics. Robotics is obviously here to stay, both the big robots like the Mako, but also a lot of the handheld robots – smaller systems that are there to help the physicians do their job better, faster and more safely.
If we look further into the future, the AI machine learning is absolutely coming. It’s already come for a lot of other specialties. I think the future is incredibly exciting, but fundamentally I think we’ve moved from the past where it was just diagnosis then treatment, to now restoration and really predictive analysis. We’ve gotten a lot better as an industry about being able to help our patients succeed long-term in whatever their goals are.
What’s the best advice you’ve received, and who gave it to you?
Dr. Desmond Kwan at John Carroll told me something to the effect of, “I know you can do it, you know you can do it, try harder and just do it.” But it’s important to note that I didn’t do this alone. I’ve had friends, advisors and colleagues who have helped me, elevated me and given advice.
What advice do you have for future leaders in the orthopedic industry?
Entrepreneurs have to have at least some knowledge of anatomy and physiology. You have to understand what the patients are being treated for. Go see a surgery, go shadow a doctor. If you don’t know what you’re trying to do to help, or how you’re impacting a patient’s life, you won’t succeed. At the end of the day, we’re here for the patients.
My other advice is to learn something that is cutting-edge, which in orthopedics, I would say is programming. Go learn a programming language, learn something about a technique or a technology that isn’t yet widely available in ortho but is widely available in, say, cardiology or dentistry. You can stay ahead of the curve by looking at where other industries are.
