Croom Medical now manufactures patient-specific orthopedic implants (in titanium, cobalt chrome, and tantalum) entirely in-house, cutting turnaround from weeks or months to a matter of days.
As a patient-specific implant is tied to one patient and often one scheduled surgery, this makes speed a clinical requirement rather than a convenience.
How it used to work
Under the conventional route, a patient-specific design would move through a chain of separate providers: one company prints the part, another machines it, a third finishes and inspects it. Each handoff adds queue time, shipping, and paperwork, and the OEM has to coordinate quality across every link.
For build-to-print work, where the design, IP, and regulatory authority stay with the OEM, that fragmentation is precisely what stretches delivery into weeks or months. Croom Medical’s new approach collapses the chain into a single site running on one quality system, with the OEM retaining design ownership while Croom Medical handles manufacturing and supplies the documentation needed for regulatory submission.
A capability built on existing infrastructure
As a reminder, Croom Medical entered metal additive manufacturing around 2010, and its tantalum work took shape through a partnership with Global Advanced Metals, first reported in 2023 and formalized in 2025 with the TALOS™ platform.
Last September, the company added Biofuse™, a lattice technology giving OEMs direct input into porosity and strut architecture for ingrowth structures. And in February, Croom Medical broke ground on its largest expansion in 42 years, a dedicated R&D and industrialization center meant to bring more of the process, including finishing, under one roof.
Considering all of that, the move to in-house manufacturing therefore seems like a natural next step in that vertical-integration trajectory which CEO Patrick Byrnes confirms: “Bringing this capability in-house is a natural extension of 40 years of orthopedic manufacturing and more than a decade in additive.”
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