ABOUT
Lawrence M Boyd, PhD
Dr. Boyd is an experienced business leader & entrepreneur, having founded two medical device-focused ventures (OrthoClip LLC and View Medical). He has three decades of experience leading product development, engineering and business development efforts for medical devices in orthopaedic and spine surgery. He is a prolific inventor, with over 60 issued U.S. patents for medical devices and related procedures.
He is currently Vice President of Product Development for Bioventus Surgical based in Durham, North Carolina. Previously he was the Executive Vice President of R&D for Spinal Elements, a medical device firm based in Marietta, Georgia and Carlsbad, California. Prior to that position, Dr. Boyd was a Director for Medtown Ventures, an Atlanta-based venture investing & consulting firm.
After receiving his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering and MS degree in Bioengineering from Clemson University in 1989, he became product development group leader and engineer at Dow Corning Wright in Arlington, TN. During his three years there, he developed implants for use in hands, feet, and knees. He then moved on to work for a small start-up company in Memphis that at the time was called Danek Medical (later Sofamor Danek). The company's focus was in an emerging arena for medical implants, spinal fusion. Dr. Boyd worked in the area of intervertebralbody fusion and artificial disc replacement.
He held positions of manager, director and group director, where he focused his efforts on research, development and commercialization of novel medical technologies. To further his leadership skills, he also enrolled in a Master of Engineering Management program that offered evening classes at Christian Brothers University. Medtronic later acquired Sofamor Danek and promoted him to vice president of product development.
Recognizing the growing importance of recombinant proteins, human tissues and other biologically inspired materials and potential for applications to spine, he started on his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University in 2000, working in the laboratory of biomedical engineering professor Lori Setton, PhD. He collaborated with Duke orthopaedic and neurosurgical spinal surgeons in research to elucidate the pathogenesis of spinal degeneration using a mouse model of disc degeneration.
Dr. Boyd has a particular interest and extensive experience with orthopaedic biomaterials including growth factors, synthetic bioactive bone grafts and human allograft. While at Sofamor Danek he was responsible for the engineering support of the preclinical and clinical studies to secure approval for rhBMP-2 (InFuse). He has a certificate in Biomolecular and Tissue Engineering from Duke University. More recently, Dr. Boyd served as Vice President of Engineering and Business Development for the Biologics Division at Spine Wave (Shelton CT) from 2013 to 2015. He has worked on a number of tissue-based materials, including engagements at the University of Florida Tissue Bank (now RTI) and the University of Miami Tissue Bank (now Vivex).
Dr. Boyd received his PhD in the summer of 2007, and accepted a position as Associate Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke. In addition, Dr. Boyd was an adjunct professor for the Biomedical Engineering Department and the Masters of Engineering Management Program at Duke. While at Duke, he developed and taught classes in technology commercialization, risk management, engineering design, and leadership. He established and led the DUHatch student business incubator, which served graduate, professional and undergraduate students.