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LOUISVILLE
- Entrepreneur Jerry Rifkin is putting his best foot forward. It's made out
of titanium plate, aircraft aluminum and steel-fiber rope..
The University of Colorado graduate student has formed a new company,
Tensegrity Prosthetics Inc. in Louisville, to market his innovative
prosthetic foot, which is designed to improve the mobility of amputees
The product was inspired by a bike accident. Rifkin had already gotten a
degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Florida and was
living in Colorado when he broke his leg in a bike accident. While learning
to walk again, he became fascinated with the concept of prosthetics.
"I realized that there were important things going on in the human
foot that hadn't been taught to me in school," Rifkin said. "I
took the time to start figuring out what was going on there and recreate
it."
He already was working on it when he enrolled as a graduate student in
mechanical engineering at CU, which gives him access to both expertise and
equipment.
Last year, Rifkin managed to land a Small Business Innovation Research
grant from the National Institutes of Health, securing $100,000 a year for
two years for research.
"The competition is fierce," Rifkin said. "It was a real
challenge to learn the proper tone to take. You can't afford to talk over
their heads, but you don't know what they know. It was a real
compromise."
He is already testing two working prototypes at the locomotion laboratory
run by Rodger Kram, an associate professor of CU's Department of
Integrative Physiology. The foot is made from a combination of
high-strength materials and uses steel cables to define its range of motion
and support the weight of its user.
"It's a lot stronger by weight than you could get with a traditional
design," Rifkin said. "It is a universal foot appropriate for
walking as well as hiking, but still light enough to use around town. It
can absorb irregularities in terrain without becoming unstable, yet it
provides the sensation of being firmly in contact with the ground. That's
one of the most important factors to amputees."
The product is an innovative solution for active amputees, and its
development is happening at an opportune time when many veterans are
returning from Iraq to the U.S. in need of such prosthetic devices.
"The self-image of amputees has changed," Kram said. "It
used to be that people who underwent amputation were happy just to be able
to walk. Today they want to be doing exactly what they were doing before
their amputation.
The goal of Jerry's device is to give people back complete mobility so that
they can hike in the flatirons, climb or do anything else they did
before."
The product also combats the draining effort required by traditional
prosthetic feet. "What I'm working for is less fatigue so that
amputees can walk as quickly and for the same distance as their friends can
walk," Rifkin explained. "That's a big deal because it's a
barrier between people that just shouldn't be there. There should be a
better way, and I think I've found it."
Rifkin also worked rigorously to file protection for his intellectual
property through the U.S. Patent Office last year. He and his colleagues
plan to begin human research trials on amputees by this spring to validate
his preproduction prototypes. The company will subsequently produce up to
200 production models to sell to 20 or more prosthetists around the Front
Range during its initial rollout. It will sell initially for $1,300.
Rifkin also is applying to the NIH for funding of the second phase of
product development, which could net him $400,000 per year for three years.
To support production, he will seek around $200,000 in venture capital
during the next year. Assuming he can secure a major customer in the
prosthetics industry, he projects the company will earn $1.4 million by its
second year in production and up to $25 million by year five.
"If I can secure the funding, I should be able to run the business
well enough to be profitable by year two," he said.
The business plan for Tensegrity Prosthetics was developed at the
university as part of its annual business plan competition conducted by
instructor Frank Moyes. Rifkin came in fourth in the competition, but he
gained the support of competition judge David Spiro, founder of the FBN
Group Inc., a strategic marketing group based in Boulder.
"I was convinced the foot was real, and that he had a good plan to
take it to market," said Spiro, who has been mentoring Rifkin.
"It really impressed me that he was so passionate about it, and I
wanted to help him succeed with the idea."
The product received further praise when it won the Best New Industrial
Product Award at the Colorado Inventors Showcase in November 2005.
"A prosthetic foot doesn't sound that intriguing, but Jerry had
devised a brilliant scheme for demonstrating it," recalled Tom Frey
executive director of the DaVinci Institute, a Louisville-based think tank
that sponsored the event. "I think if there's anyone that call pull
off this business, it's Jerry Rifkin. He has unusually good insights and
really has all the markings of a successful entrepreneur."
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