Greg Lucier is the founder of Corza Health and Corza Medical. [Photo courtesy of Corza Health]
That’s according to Greg Lucier, who serves as CEO of Corza Health, the holding company he founded with private equity firm GTCR in 2019 before launching Corza Medical the next year. (Lucier is also the non-executive chair of medtech CDMO Medical Device Components, and he previously led NuVasive and Life Technologies as CEO and chair.)
“I can’t speak for GTCR,” Lucier said, “but we’re year five now into Corza Medical, so we’re probably on the other end now of starting to look at harvesting the business, if you will, and recapitalizing it with new money and returning the money to our original investors.”
In an interview ahead of Medical Design & Outsourcing‘s annual Leadership in Medtech issue, Lucier discussed growth at the surgical tech manufacturer and how it plans to compete against the world’s largest device developers and manufacturers.
Corza Health and Corza Medical
Westwood, Massachusetts-based Corza Medical has around 3,000 employees and reported nearly $451 million in revenue for 2023, landing at No. 94 on the Medtech Big 100 ranking by revenue.
“Corza continues to do exceptionally well,” Lucier said. “We’re growing double digits in a number of our categories. We continue to globalize the business, entering a number of new markets for each of our different verticals.”
The fastest-growing space is the TachoSil biosurgery business that Corza bought from Takeda in 2021 after the Japanese company and Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon unit called off a deal due to antitrust concerns from EU regulators.
“We’ve re-energized it with phenomenal management, and they have done an exceptional job expanding that business to, I think, its rightful leadership place in the biosurgery category,” Lucier said. “TachoSil is an amazing product. It’s 20 years old, but it might as well be new because we continue to find new clients, new surgical procedures, and we’re working on some really fascinating things to take the product itself and move it much more into minimally invasive surgery.”
Instead of selling through distributors as it had in the past, Corza Medical switched to direct sales for TachoSil.
“We didn’t know who the customers were. We were worried that our business would go to zero,” Lucier said. “In fact, it’s doubled almost since we moved to direct. We were able to find the customers, sell them TachoSil and then, of course, build on those relationships. And I just couldn’t be more proud of our team that has done that.”
Most recently, Corza in July 2024 purchased the TachoSil manufacturing operations in Linz, Austria, that make the fibrin sealant patch to control bleeding during surgical procedures. That deal “connected the head with the body [for] a completely vertically integrated enterprise,” Lucier said.
Corza is also funding U.S. clinical trials for additional TachoSil procedure indications that “Takeda had not invested in,” he added. The TachoSil business is an example of how Corza identifies medtech products that could thrive with more focus and investment, Lucier said.
“Inside a giant pharmaceutical company like Takeda, it was a little bit of the stepchild,” he said. “Here, it’s our centerpiece. … The thesis that got us into all these different franchises was most of our competitors are part of larger enterprises — world-class companies — but the attention to detail, the personal touch, the service excellence, operating at a different level, that’s what brought us into these investments, and that’s how we want to perform with our clients.”
Corza’s also investing in manufacturing capabilities like 3D printing in its ophthalmology business, using selective laser sintering (SLS) for stainless steel products like cannulas.
That “dramatically changes the form factors and the cost structure of what we can do with some of those precision instruments,” he said.
Leading and competing against the biggest OEMs
Corza Medical can’t outspend the largest medical device developers and manufacturers on R&D, so don’t expect cutting-edge blockbusters, Lucier said.
“That’s not who we are,” he said. “We have great new products coming out, but we do it far more efficiently. … Where we differentiate ourselves is creating that much more custom, bespoke relationship between us and the clients where we know exactly where they are, what they’re doing. We’re in the surgeries with them constantly, and we’re just trying to be far more intimate than the big guys can ever be, because it’s just not their consuming focus like it is for Corza Medical.”
Asked for advice that could help other device developers and manufacturers better understand customer needs, Lucier offered an example from Corza Medical’s ophthalmology business.
“We’ve got a great selling force here and in Europe working directly with ophthalmologists, and we require them to be in surgery three times a week with their clients,” he said. “They’re right there alongside the surgeon, watching, advising, talking about the procedure, and they get incredible insights through the dialogue with these ophthalmologists.”
Onatec ophthalmic microsurgical sutures [Image courtesy of Corza Medical]
“It was a product line that existed inside our our main wound closure business, but we really had not put much emphasis on it,” he said. “Now we’ve completely gone through the whole product line, done a number of updates to it, and rebranded it with fresh approaches for what it can do for our clients.”
The ophthalmology business has also been the tip of the spear for Corza Medical’s digitization efforts.
“You can shop online and get all the information you need about our myriad of products that we offer in that category,” he said. “We’ve done an amazing job merchandising around a good, better, and best option in each of the different types of instruments we offer, and coming in the first part of 2025 is a service portal where if you’re a client of ours, you’ll have all your service history, your purchase orders, everything you need to interact with us in a real-time basis, right there, online. And that’s saying a lot, because we deal with thousands of customers, we have tens of thousands of SKUs, and so creating real simplicity to understanding where we are together in our relationship is absolutely critical.”
Corza Medical is now making the same digitization moves for its wound closure business and plans to do the same for its biosurgery business.
“We’ve gone through a Pareto of the top 20 things that a client really, really wants,” Lucier said. “They can be as prosaic as who’s [their] representative because there’s turnover in their office, there’s turnover in our organization, and now we make it super simple. Tell us your ZIP code or tell us your name, we’ll tell you exactly who to call inside our company. We’ve gone through all that in ophthalmology to create a really custom, client-oriented relationship online or in person so you can interact with Corza Medical, and we’re going to do that across the board in 2025.”
With such tall barriers to competition due to bundling deals by major OEMs, Corza Medical is maintaining its strategic focus on minimally invasive procedures and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs).
“Where we’ve had to compete, and we’ve competed extremely successfully, is away from the giant urban centers — more rural hospitals, ASCs, doctor’s offices,” he said. “We are growing double digits in those different categories of different areas. We do so because we have to avoid the giant bundle where the J&J’s of the world have completely locked up business. … We’re just continuing to mine the gold shaft.”
He sees at least five or six more good years ahead for the medical healthcare market, which for now “remains robust.”
“I do believe we’re going to have more and more economic cost challenges coming into the medical field, whether it’s the federal deficit requiring the federal government to finally figure out a way to streamline things in terms of the healthcare market,” he said. “We as suppliers into that are going to have to be really on our game to be responsive. And so that’s why Corza Medical offering the best value, the best service, always driving to lower costs — that’s a North Star that I think is entirely defensible today, and even more so tomorrow.”
Asked who might own Corza Medical five years from now or even by the end of 2025, Lucier said there will likely be news soon.
“As I said, we’re coming up on the five-year mark,” he said. “That’s typically when private equity firms start to think about when we get a return on our investments. [Medical Design & Outsourcing] will be the first to hear, so stay tuned.”
We’ll have more from our interview with Greg Lucier in the weeks ahead. Sign up for our free twice-weekly newsletter so you don’t miss the next post in our series.
