Shara Diers, a physician assistant in orthopedic surgery at Sanford Health in Fargo, North Dakota, has assisted on countless total knee replacement surgeries over the past two decades. In all that time though, one aspect of the surgery has always bothered her.
“When you make the tibial cut on a total knee, a lot of people are really tight. Their knees are really tight,” said Diers. “It’s just a hard bone fragment to get out in one piece. So it was just one of those moments where I went, you know, ‘I think we could combine a couple instruments and make something that would work better.’”
With that kernel of an idea, Diers — who studied biomedical engineering in college — went to work on the shark tooth clamp. It looks like a pair of scissors, with one blade forked at the end and the other blade replaced by a row of pointed teeth.
“I did some drawings, approached a couple of the surgeons and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ And they looked at it and they said, ‘Yeah, that looks like something that would be really useful,’” Diers said.
From ‘spark’ to Sanford Innovations
From there, the path was a long one. While working on her device, Diers partnered with Sanford Innovations, a branch of the hospital system that has worked on more than 300 inventions, and helps employees like Diers bring their ideas to market.
“We take care of the business side. Getting the agreements in place, making sure we’re protecting our inventor and our patients,” said Katie Pohlson, vice president of innovation and commercialization. “But really Shara’s been that inventive spark behind all of this.”
Sanford Innovations connected Diers with Innomed, a global orthopedic instrument manufacturer, who would help create the clamp.
“They send me back 3D renderings. I get to make adaptations to it. Then what they do is they send me a 3D printed prototype to actually look at and feel,” said Diers.
Eventually when Diers was happy with the plastic prototype, a metal version was created and prepared for trial.
“It was everything I wanted it to be,” Diers said.
Shark tooth clamp takes hold
The first time it was used by Matthew Nelsen, M.D., Diers’ supervising physician of more than 15 years, it was pretty clear her invention was a success.
“When we grab onto the piece of bone with that shark, it won’t let go. I mean, it hangs on,” said Dr. Nelsen.
After four years of development, the shark tooth clamp was on the market.
“Sometime in February, I got an email from Innomed. They told me to check the Innomed website, so I went and I popped it up, front page of their website is my clamp,” Diers said with a laugh. “It’s kind of cool. Yeah, it’s pretty exciting.”
As it turned out, Sanford wasn’t the only hospital that thought the clamp was a good idea either.
“The first production run they made 50. They sold out almost right away,” said Diers. By the time they had a hundred more made, they already had 24 back orders.”
“It works great,” said Dr. Nelsen. “We have enough contacts with orthopedic surgeons at other hospitals in the area, and everybody seems to love it.”
Growing family of sharks
Diers isn’t done inventing though. Her shark tooth clamp has been such a hit that she’s developing different versions of it for other surgeries. They include a larger clamp for hip replacement, which she has dubbed “The Meg” and a smaller version, which she lovingly calls “Baby Shark.”
“The comment that I got from Innomed was on my first clamp that they don’t recall ever having a new instrument take off as fast as this one did,” said Diers. “And with the femoral head extraction clamp that I’m designing, they are very excited about that one and think that one’s going to be a home run as well.”
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Posted In Fargo, Innovations, Orthopedics
