Depuy Products Inc history

By 1898, however, the business had outgrown its temporary quarters and moved into its own space in downtown Warsaw.

In 1901 he moved the operation to Niles, Michigan—taking with him his wife of five years, Winifred Stoner.

In 1901 he moved the operation to Niles, Michigan—taking with him his wife of five years, Winifred Stoner. It was in Michigan, in 1903, that he incorporated the company as DePuy Manufacturing Company of Elk-hart, Indiana.

Unfortunately, however, the move to Michigan did not accomplish what DePuy had hoped, so in 1904 he and Winifred moved the splint business back to Warsaw.

By 1919 the company had 16 employees, six of whom were traveling salesmen.

In 1926, former DePuy salesman (and Revra DePuy's first hire) Justin O. Zimmer made overtures about buying the business but was rebuffed.

When Winifred DePuy Leiter died in 1949, her second husband was left as sole owner of DePuy Manufacturing.

The newly married couple spent less than a year together, however; in May 1950, Leiter passed away.

In 1951 Amrette married Harry Hoopes, a Bell Telephone executive.

In 1963 Thackray began working with the world’s foremost pioneer in hip replacement surgery, Sir John Charnley, to produce cemented hip fixation systems.

They sold DePuy to a group of investors in 1965, and Landis became the company’s president.

DePuy changed ownership again in 1968, when Bio-Dynamics, Inc., a blood diagnostic business, acquired it.

In 1974 Bio-Dynamics itself was purchased by Boehringer Mannheim, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Europe.

In 1979 the company gained the rights to use a new technology--a method of sintering a porous surface to orthopaedic implants, thereby allowing human tissue to be more effectively fixed--devised by Canadian Oxygen, Ltd.

In 1984 Robert Williams retired as DePuy’s president, and was replaced by James Lent.

1985 revenues alone topped $95 million.

Some of this growth was the result of a strategic partnership established in 1989 with the DuPont Company.

The first of these came in 1990, when Boehringer Mannheim purchased Charles F. Thackray Limited, of Leeds, England.

In 1991 DePuy purchased the Rotek Corporation, a medical products manufacturer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

DePuy expanded its presence in the arthroscopy market in 1993, establishing a separate manufacturing operation in Ontario, California, to produce arthroscopy instruments.

Another 1994 acquisition was DePuy CMW, a bone cement manufacturer based in Blackpool, England.

The company had diversified to the point that 50 percent of its sales in 1999 occurred outside the United States.

Of the three products that have embroiled DePuy in billion-dollar lawsuits — the Pinnacle Hip Replacement System, the ASR XL Acetabular System total hip replacement, and the ASR Hip Resurfacing System — the Pinnacle was approved by the FDA in 2000.

The DePuy ASR Hip Resurfacing System began being sold internationally beginning in 2003.

The ASR XL System was launched in the United States in 2005.

In August 2012, Johnson & Johnson settled three different claims with DePuy ASR plaintiffs in state court cases amounting to approximately $200,000 each.

Thousands of ASR hip lawsuits were settled in 2013 for a total cost of $4 billion, and about 6,000 Pinnacle hip lawsuits were settled for about $1 billion.

The company includes approximately 250 subsidiaries with operations in over 60 countries and products sold in over 175 countries, with worldwide sales of $70.1 billion during 2015.

In December 2016, DePuy Synthes announced it would acquire Pulsar Vascular Inc., adding Pulsar to its Codman division.

DePuy began seeing the first Attune Knee lawsuits in 2017 and more continue to be filed.

DePuy is the world’s oldest manufacturer of orthopedics devices and remains one of the largest, with estimated 2018 revenue of $8.8 billion, making the company, the second largest orthopedics manufacturer in the world.