By LARRY BIRGER Business Monday Editor
An up-and-coming
South Florida company is helping American dentists realize that
Europe isn't the only source for the best tooth-replacement
technology.Just two years after its founding, Impla-med, headquartered in Sunrise, is making headway in a business that has been dominated by Sweden's Nobel-Pharma. The com- pany makes implants, metal pins permanently anchored to the upper and lower jawbone around which periodontists fashion artificial teeth made of porcelain and other materials.
With $3,000 of their own money, Bruce L. Nickerson and James and Joseph Davis founded Impla-med in 1989. The three held engineering and managerial positions and worked together at Miami-based Cordis Corp.
"We talked about a number of products in orthopedics and oral reconstruction and decided our best bet was in implants since the field is still in its infancy," Nickerson says. The implant market is estimated at $450 million annually, growing at a 17 percent rate.
"Impla-med is the equal in quality of any product, and the price is good," says prominent New Jersey periodontist Charles Berman. "I love it."
While Nickerson and Karen Vinjamuri, a venture capitalist who was recently recruited to be chairman and chief executive, decline to supply current figures, they report the company has been profitable since October and will quadruple 1990's sales this year.
They are not inhibited about forecasting the future. "We are on track to do $2 million by 1993 and $20 million annually by the middle 1990s," Vinjamuri says.
That's a far cry from February 1989, when Nickerson lost his job as vice president for North American operations of Teletronics Pacing Systems, an Australian company that had acquired Cordis' heart pacemaker division a year earlier.
"I was declared surplus," says Nickerson, 46. Soon after, he and the Davis brothers began searching for "opportunities" in the medical devices field.
Nickerson concedes his decision was influenced by his father, whose death at the age of 71 was attributed to colitis and ulcers.
"He lost his teeth at 17," he said. "His false teeth never fit right, so he didn't wear them. It used to kill me that he was never able to pulverize and digest his food - and that we couldn't always understand when he spoke."
At first, when compared with Nobel-Pharma, Micro-med's implants were "me, too," Nickerson admits. But the company scored a breakthrough last year with two innovative implant components. Impla-med and the Davises have also designed 121 different pros- thetic devices and surgical instruments to aid the dentist in installing implants.
The company now employs nine, plus 13 sales representatives who are scouring the country for business. To date, investors have poured $600,000 into Impla-med, the majority from principals such as Nickerson.
"We're not all the way there, but we're making progress," says Vinjamuri, brought on board to plumb for additional capital. "Last month, we had 200 dentists using our products, this month another 200. We're still young, but we’re confident Impla- med is in the market to stay."
