Episode Transcript
Tom Salemi here. Welcome back to the Ortho Innovation Talks podcast. We’ve got a great conversation for you in this episode. A lot of fun, actually. I very rarely want to be invited to dinner at a podcast guest house. I mean, they’re all delightful people. I love talking to them, but I just had a great time talking with Suniti Gurupati. She’s the Vice president of R&D for bracing and support at Enovis.
And in addition to having an exceptional family, as you’ll learn, she also has an exceptional way to make desserts. So I had a lot of fun unpacking her story and learning about her Enovis support and bracing business, and about the engineering and R&D that goes into that. So I’m sure you’ll enjoy this conversation as well. Well, Suneethi Gudapati, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you. Honored to be here.
It’s great to have you. Looking forward to understanding how you’re viewing the bracing and support business at Enovis. I’m sure you’ve listened to previous conversations with your colleagues. We love to unpack your background and learn how you got into MedTech. But first, I find entrepreneurs exciting and I love business ventures. So I want to dive right into the, the ice cream business that you had started a few years ago.
How did, how did that come to be? Was that your first time, your full-time gig, and you dived in headfirst, or were you helping someone else? How did the ice cream venture come together? Tell us a bit about it.
It’s a very interesting journey. Actually, Tom. It was interesting because I was taking a career break with my kids and oh, great. Said that, hey, you know, I need to spend more time with kids. But as I was doing that and I was heavily volunteering in school, I figured I was missing that.
Insights into like, you know, having that technical challenges that you get. I was telling my husband, hey, you know, I really can’t go full time into a job yet, but I still want to do something that is just not volunteering in school and teaching math to kids. Then he said, ice cream sounds good. So he debated between ice, ice cream, and a barber shop. And my kids picked ice cream because they were, that’s how we ended up with ice cream.
That’s a tough choice. Yeah.
I said one location. And my husband said, business-wise, it doesn’t make sense to have one franchise location, so you need to have three. And at that point I didn’t think much. I’m like, yeah, okay, what about three? But once I started getting into it, getting the permits and the buildings, the FDA approved the health agency approvals, not the FDA. I’m too much in FDA health agency approvals.
It was complex. It was really a complex equation and completely new for me. Never been in that space. I was an engineer, hardcore engineer all my life. And now you’re trying to go and figure all this out. Getting the contracts, getting the contractors to design the space. How do you even hire people for making ice cream?
So did you have an affinity or an affection for ice cream? Is there a personal connection there? Or did you just understand that everyone loves ice cream, so this is a great business to get into?
I got a personal connection because of being able to make ice cream in front of people the way they want it. So there was science. So it was liquid nitrogen. We were using liquid nitrogen to actually make ice cream. So that’s what kind of interested me quite a bit, because it was science and engineering. How do you get the right liquid nitrogen in? And the franchise at that point was new, so they were not prepared to a lot of the volume buildup and how does the liquid nitrogen pressure get set up? And the nozzles broke.
So there was a lot of engineering behind it that had to go in. So that kind of kept me excited. And I got to teach science to students in school. So I went to school and I made this entire program to teach them gas law and gave them ice cream at the end. Even now, I get messages from some of those kids saying, oh, we still remember what you taught us. Just because they got ice cream at the end.
Best class ever. That’s great. So I could walk into the shop and just like a coffee shop and order the ice cream just the way I want it.
Yes. And you can actually give it. Like, we would make our own cashew milk. We would make our own milks to make it. And there were people who had a lot of allergies. They actually brought their milk from home and they would say, this is the only one I can use. Can you please make us some ice cream? Because we couldn’t eat ice cream anywhere else.
So we were able to do that. So it was exciting.
Your MedTech mission carried over even into the ice cream shop. You were taking care of people. That’s amazing.
Before that, I wasn’t in MedTech, actually. I was in semiconductor industry and food service industry. So I have a very varied background.
Well, let’s unpack that then. I thought, when I checked, I thought you had had a stint in MedTech just prior to that. So how did you find your way into engineering initially? What were your interests originally?
It’s a long story, but if I tell you in a quick intercept of that would be mechanical engineering is what I started because no one was in mechanical engineering. Way back when I was starting in India there were no female engineers and that kind of enticed me a little. And it was more hands on. I wanted something to do with my hands. So I got into engineering. And then once I got into mechanical engineering it really interested me in those days computers. In 1986 and 90s there was, computers were coming up.
My dad really wanted me to get into that, but I talked him out of it. And then I convinced four other girls to join mechanical engineering after me. So that’s how I ended up in mechanical engineering. Then I came here for my master’s and then the journey has continued there on.
So did you have a specific industry in mind when you were pursuing mechanical engineering or did you just want to engineer for somebody?
I just wanted engineering that I could do. Build something and do something. So the first job I really got out of college was KFC Eat really designing their heat transfer equipment, ovens and stuff to make food that would. They had fresh frozen food that they would come into the stores. And how do you make it taste as if it was made in the store by using the oven. So that’s what was my first job.
Wow, so you had some franchise experience. You’re selling yourself short with the.
I was in the corporate world at that point.
No franchise then, no franchising that then. And I know you went into Variant at some point. How did you find your way into the MedTech industry after? So you went from Variant, you started the Sub Zero ice cream and yogurt company or the store and then what was next after that? What brought you back into the workforce?
So after my break then my daughters obviously grew up and then started their college and they said mom, you know, come on, get real, get your own life. And we had to move to Seattle because we sold our ice cream business. My older daughter got an opportunity to skip high school and go to college. So then I had to move because she was 13. So that move made us forced our hands to sell the ice cream business.
And that’s how we got out of ice cream business. And then when I went to Seattle, I started looking for jobs. My first job I got was in Microsoft because that was after my career break too. So it took a struggle. I got into Microsoft and that was like designing almost like a Fitbit, but not really. To monitor heart rate and everything that is available. Once I got into that, that’s how I got introduced into MedTech. But my husband was always in MedTech and he always talked highly.
That enticed me a little in the past. My sister is a doctor, but I thought, well, I don’t want to work in the same industry as my husband. But once I started getting into that through Microsoft, then I got interested in it. So that’s what drove my interest up.
That’s my hope. My son is a mechanical engineering student at Purdue and he wants to get into aerospace. And I keep talking up MedTech, but I don’t know if it’s enticing or antagonizing when it’s your dad. So I just. I try to keep it on the low down.
It gets enticing after a while, believe me. My kids keep telling me they didn’t want to be an engineer, but now they both ended up in engineering.
No way.
Really? Yeah.
That’s amazing. I want to unpack. Your daughter’s skipping high school, but we’ll let her have her own private life.
Yeah.
So you were at Physio-Control, and then so did that. I know that’s not part of Stryker now. That was not an element of Microsoft. I’m forgetting. That is.
Physio-Control is Stryker. It’s acquired by Stryker. So I made defibrillators over there.
Okay, so did you work with Physio-Control before it became part of Stryker or after?
Just as it became Stryker. Okay, so I was in it when it was called Stryker. They were transitioning into it.
Okay, and from there you moved on to Philips. What were your?
Yes, then I left Seattle because my daughter then wanted to move into dorms. My life is pretty much revolving around my family, like my husband and my daughters, I think. Story of a lot of women in this day and age. So then once she moved into college dorms, then my husband said, you know, I’m in California. What are you doing in Seattle? So I moved back. And my opportunity then was in Philips, and I stayed in Philips for a while.
So you found the MedTech connection with your husband enticing? You had the experience with Physio-Control and then Stryker. Something kept you in MedTech. What was it that you found that held you here at Physio Control?
We were making defibrillators. The next-gen defibrillators. So that really made me more interested and passionate about MedTech because we were making difference to people’s lives. When everybody talked about it in the past, it didn’t make a big deal. But at that point I felt the impact. I felt what you’re doing. If one defibrillator fails, you’re really impacting your life. Someone could die if it doesn’t work.
So that passion kind of grew and I was focused on saying, nope, this is it. This is my calling. I want to continue my work in MedTech because that makes a difference and that’s very impactful and powerful.
That’s great. What were you able to work on while you’re at Philips?
At Philips, I started with ventilators. I started as an R&D engineer in ventilators and I was heavily involved again. I had a lot of experience in lithium ion batteries, so was an R&D leader for that. Then quickly the team Philips felt the need to ramp up ventilators during our COVID time frame. So I was moved on to that project to say, how can we quickly ramp up building in couple of different locations internationally?
And we, I worked on that, bringing all of that together, seeing my strengths in that, they actually moved me into a leadership role, into supply chain. Believe it or not, I went from engineering to supply chain and I thought, guys, really, you’re doing a big mistake. I’m an engineer.
You keep saying this, but you find other opportunities.
No, it was interesting. I now make the connection after all these years and I give that advice to all the young engineers. Now. Don’t be focused on saying, hey, this is all it is. No, but you can use engineering in every aspect of the business. So I was in supply chain for a while. Then they moved me into quality supply, quality engineering. So I was leading that team as a project manager at one point, leading almost 300 people and then becoming a leader in supply quality engineer.
Before I moved here, when you mentioned that you were working on ventilators and I looked at your LinkedIn profile, which I have open here, March 2018 to April 2024. So I wanted to. I did want to unpack. So you were there during the COVID era. I mean, I can’t imagine any more direct exposure to the, to the MedTech mission at that point when you were literally seeing your work change people’s worlds.
What was that?
Ventilators?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What was that experience like? What were your days like? Were you, were you taking on night and day sort of 24/7 kind of lifestyle?
Yes, it was 24/7. I think that’s when I got used to workaholism.
Because every second mattered Every minute mattered. How can you. There was shortage all across. When building ventilators does not just mean one part. There were gazillions. You go all the way down to the smallest resistor, something that is used somewhere. And that you. If you cannot source that, then you cannot build a ventilator. People don’t see that. They say, hey, why can’t you? No, you cannot, because these are all interconnected. And you will have something in Philippines making that. And if that factory has shut down, then I cannot make it so this complex parts, gazillions of them. When you have to coordinate all that effort and work with all these different governments to have their facilities open, to have the processes in place in order to manage the COVID was a complex one.
We had huge teams working round the clock, like you mentioned. There was no time limitations and we were just constantly virtually working.
And going back to your point about engineers being more than engineers, I imagine your engineering mindset came into a huge play at that point because you just had to find ways to make things work.
Correct. And how do you make them creatively find solutions just because someone said, hey, we cannot do this, then what is the alternate? What are the parallel paths? What are all the other paths that you can bring in? And you will have at any given day, three parallel paths going to solve just one problem.
Because that is what would drive us to the solution. And it. And someone would say at the end, like someone from some country would say, hey, my family member is in the hospital. They’re not able to get the ventilators. Can Philips help us? And those things made the impact and connected and that made us going continuously.
How, how unusual were those few years of your life? Have you experienced anything like it before or since? And not sure you want to, but just what was that period like?
No, no, it was very, very touching to see so much of comradeship between countries, between people, between cultures. At that point, nobody talked about cultural differences, saying, oh, you know what? Asia behaves like this, Europe behaves like this, us, nobody talked about it. Now we do in our corporate worlds. We talk about, hey, that’s cultural difference. But in those days, everybody was addressing the same problem.
We were all on the same page.
Yeah, no, it’s. That’s a great point. And you were hoping, we were all hoping for permanent change. And I’m not sure, I’m fairly sure we didn’t get it. But we’ll move on from.
We’ll get there at some point.
We’ll get there at some point. It’s there. It’s in our programming. We just need to find it.
Yes.
So let’s talk about the move over to Enovis. How did this opportunity come to you and why did you make the move?
Actually, it was just very random. Someone from Enovis called me and said, hey, will you be interested? And for some reason I was actually in India working with my team in India at that point as a global team. And then I said, well, no harm. I generally don’t pick up calls, but that time I somehow did. And then I said, okay, no harm, let’s listen to it. And when I heard and I looked up, I was like very enticed and intrigued by the way this part of the business works because I was on Class 2, Class 3 devices in Philips with MR Machine, CT machines and ultrasound.
And this is like actually helping the knee pains or, you know, shoulder pains and the joint pains. And that seems so interesting and different. And my daughter has a lot of knee issues. My mother has knee issues. So I was like, this sounds like so much like it. I felt like it was calling me saying, Suneethi, come, come, you know, that’s it.
We’ll talk a bit about the portfolio. So you’re vice president of research and development for braces and support. Talk a bit about the. You mentioned a few. But what does your portfolio look like? What are you, what are you overseeing? Give us a sense of that.
I oversee all of bracing and support. So anything that you need post operative are preventive. We do bracing. We have shoulder braces, we have back braces, we have knee braces, neck. Name any body part that will help you to heal either post operative or preoperative. We do do that. So Enovis, as you know, is a complete portfolio that you do. You can start from pre-care to surgery to post-care. So we have the entire portfolio for that.
And as the head of R&D, what’s your- I’m sure you have many charters, many missions or objectives, but are you looking to improve upon? I’m sure this is going to be a both kind of answer, but I’m sure you’re going to improve upon your current portfolio. But are you also finding opportunities to help people recover from injuries that aren’t currently supported by your product lines? How much of your job is that is new products for new applications with new products.
I actually divide it amongst both.
Part of it is to address what is on current portfolio to see how we can get better. Maybe there’s more composite materials that are out there that will make it lighter, you know, simpler to use and that is more efficient. And how do we make clinical studies? And we also look at future futuristically. What is that one situation that has not been addressed yet that we would like to see in our patients?
We try to go hear from the patients, from the doctors, from everyone else to put that all together and then see how we can make an impact.
So do you think people give. When you hear braces and support, you wonder if there’s any opportunity for R&D there. You think those are done? We have knit braces, we have support.
Why are those people wrong in thinking that? What are they missing?
I would not say anyone is wrong or right. I do believe that every place in this world has an opportunity for improvement and innovation. Who thought 10 years ago that AI ChatGPT would even exist? We never believed in that. If someone would have gone and shown this idea to someone 10 years ago, they would be like, that’s impossible. We cannot do that. Even before that. Cell phones, not possible, just like that. There is always something out there that we can go innovate and be better at and make it that much smarter.
And that is just making it all better for all of us. And we are all aging. The age that we live to now has. Average age is increased now. And with that comes its own challenges. And how can we all support that? And the more sports people play, the more every genetically also we are seeing more and more concerns and issues, whether it’s joints, whether it’s back, whether it’s this, that all of those need some kind of solutions.
And if we don’t think about it, then we’ll never be able to solve it and we have to have that vision.
Great point. Well, let’s look at your. The existing portfolio you kind of covered a little bit before looking at different composite, different materials. How can you improve upon the product you currently have? How do you look at, how do you apply your R&D skill set to your current portfolio?
We constantly look at multiple different ways. We have a team who works on purely just working on that advanced engineering. So we have the right people in right seats, as I call it, to think about. What is the future? Where do we really look at it? Is it composite material? Is it a pain area like a shoulder area, something that we have not addressed? What is it that we have not seen yet that we want to address? That’s one way of looking at it.
I also have teams going and seeing, talking to the customers, talking to the patients, talking to the doctors to see what is one thing that they see that we have not addressed yet that they would like to see it addressed. We put it all into one bucket and then determine what makes sense to prioritize.
Do these braces and supports, do they primarily just do that support and brace or are you applying therapeutic applications to them as well? Heating or vibration or things like that? Is that part of these offerings?
We are looking into that constraint because we do partner with our recovery science also. So we do have a very close relationship. All R&D leaders across novs. We stay connected to ensure that if there’s any partnerships we can build on.
And looking at opportunities or areas that you’re not currently providing products for. What are some areas that some health concerns or injuries that people could either don’t have sufficient support for now or don’t have any sort of support for now. What are you looking for outside of your portfolio?
As you know, a lot of those things are done well in confidential.
I was worried about that.
Yeah, no, no, it’s one of those things. If I start talking about it then it becomes like, you know, all the other competition might look. There are a lot of places I think lot of companies are looking at even improving our own current portfolio. If you see we have Rome brace which we introduced for single upright and it’s helping with OA patients, especially.
Aging population because it’s very light brace, very easy to put it on, very easy to remove it. So that’s one of our key things. And Defiance Pro, we have really revamped our Defiance bracelet which is for football and it’s gotten much better, sleek looking, it’s really cool. So you know, we have some new things that we do come up with every year.
So what are some other. Do you have another product that you’ve rolled out recently that sort of highlights the R&D process and the innovation process.
At Enovis we had Air select which we did a few years ago and then also we had an exact fit shoulder which is for the shoulder which helps with right after the shoulder surgery making keeping it in an airplane mode and then down. So it also helps with both of them. And we have recently released a trend brace which we also helps with the neck.
My brother recently had shoulder surgery and I had no idea how still his arm had to be for a month.
Yes, shoulder is really tough. I had a couple of shoulder surgeries myself and then it is very hard. You cannot sleep well once you have that shoulder surgery.
So I can imagine since you’ve had that experience, as I said, people can look at it like, oh, it’s a shoulder brace. What can you do? But when you see what actually is required, there must be room for improvement, for making that more comfortable. Yeah. Yes.
Every brace. And we do look at it, and we do try to see how we can get better at it.
So looking broadly, zooming out a bit, where do you see the brace and support industry moving forward in terms of new technologies or new applications?
I do believe that there’s always a lot of joints that we have in the body that can be addressed because there are new and faster recovery. Because as we know, especially in United States, a lot of it is based on insurance. So how do we really get to the patient to be able to faster heal the. So they can go back to work faster? What can we do? Whether it’s making it that much easier, bracing it well, supporting it well, all the different things, or maybe even using some kind of AI technology.
There’s no limit to any of this these days. So, you know, we are looking at all of it.
How does that. I was going to ask the AI question, but I’m like, I’m not going to ask the AI question in this regard, but is there. I mean, again, you’re not going to give away state secrets, but can these devices get smarter?
I think so. I think there’s always room for AI in every aspect of life.
Yep. And I suppose connected health.
Connected health as well. I mean, if you have a bracelet sort of communicating that this person is moving their arm three times a day like they’re supposed to and things like that, I’m sure that’s all part of it as well.
Correct. So there are a lot of different opportunities for the AI to kind of come into the bracing and support.
Fascinating. All right, well, I’m willing to bet that you at your home are somehow making ice cream for company with liquid nitrogen. Is that true?
Yes. I do love ice cream and I do love making it, so definitely. And I can tell you how exciting it is to make ice cream with liquid nitrogen.
That sounds great. Well, hopefully you’ll find it. You’ll enjoy a long career here and then maybe get back into teaching and get some kids excited with the With Ice Cream Awards again. It sounds like it was a very impactful way to teach, so thanks so much. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate the time.
Thank you, Tom. Appreciate you inviting me for this.
And that is a wrap. Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of the Ortho Innovation Talks podcast. We’d love to have you not miss a future episode of this and our other great podcast. So please make sure you subscribe to DeviceTalks Podcast Network and also follow DeviceTalks on LinkedIn while you’re there. Connect with me. Connect with our Managing editor, Kayleen Brown. Connect with Enovis.
That way you’ll be completely plugged into all that’s going on on this side of MedTech. So once again, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Ortho Innovation Talks podcast.
