The Coors family has been making ceramic subcomponents for medical equipment manufacturers and other companies for years. Now it has launched a business to develop and manufacture orthopedic medical implants and instruments, CoorsTek Medical.

The family combined its existing medtech subcomponent development and manufacturing company, CoorsTek (Golden, CO), with its own cardiac implantable medtech manufacturer, C5 Medical Werks Inc., and Fort Worth, TX-based Innovation Medical Device Solutions (IMDS), which it bought in 2013.

CoorsTek makes components and products using ceramics, metals, plastics, and specialty composites for joint reconstruction, extremities, trauma, spine, sports medicine, minimally invasive surgery, general surgery, cardiovascular, pulmonary, dental, dermatology, and other highly specialized surgical fields.

It supplies "all the major OEMS," including Zimmer, Stryker, Biomet, Smith & Nephew, Medtronic and Boston Scientific, Jonathan Coors, CEO of the new company, told Qmed. It will continue to operate in that vein, he added.

C5 Medical Werks Inc. manufactures and sells ceramic components for hip, knee, spine and dental applications, according to a company overview by Bloomberg Businessweek. It also makes components for cochlear, pain management, electro implantable feed-throughs, heart pumps, and brachytherapy, and sold its products in the United States and internationally, the Bloomberg report said. IMDS is an orthopedic implantable-device developer and contract manufacturer.

The integration of the three companies began late last year, according to a CoorsTek Medical statement.

Headquartered in Fort Worth, CoorsTek Medical wasa natural outgrowth of CoorsTek's work, according to the CEO, who came over from CoorsTek to lead the new company. It has R&D or manufacturing facilities in Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Oregon.

CoorsTek Medical is unlikely to produce devices under its own brand name, but will work with individuals and companies to design, develop and manufacture implantables, company spokesperson Bill Fallon said.

So why add a start-to-finish orthopedic medical device company now? There are plenty of reasons, according to Coors.

"When we analyze markets, we look at all of the contributing factors," he said. "It's not just the aging population, but increased life expectancy."

CoorsTek Medical also has the advantage of scale, with the capability of producing more than 1 million medical components spanning over 15 product sectors in a typical year, according to the company statement. 

Innovation is also important to the family, which takes the long view on how the new business may evolve, Jonathan Coors added.

"We're a 100-year-old family business," he said. "A lot of the way we approach things is not just for the next five to seven years."