About Icarus Medical

My name is Dave Johnson, I’m the founder and patient zero at Icarus Medical. I started this company because I had a knee injury when I was 15. I was playing football and dislocated my knee. That created a cartilage defect behind my kneecap, which progressed and started to wear to bone-on-bone arthritis in my 20s, which is about 30 to 40 years earlier than most people get in the U.S. So, I realized there were not really any conservative ways to manage the type of knee osteoarthritis that I have, which is patellofemoral knee osteoarthritis, which affects about 80-90% of people who have knee osteoarthritis.

In my early 30s, I realized I pretty much needed a knee replacement. I had no cartilage left. There was no surgery that was going to be able to help my knee. That was sort of a partial or full joint replacement. The problem with that is that the more active you are, the faster you wear out a replacement, and there’s always the risk of complications. Around 20 percent of people who have it aren’t happy with it, it never feels right.

In talking to my surgeon, he explained that if I lost weight, I might actually have a lot less pain in my knee because forces multiply by about three to five times your body weight. And so I started thinking about that, and I thought, “You know, I may not be able to lose very much weight, but if I can get a knee brace that actually springs me back up and takes the weight off my knee, it might help me and allow me to stay active. I like skiing, snowboarding, wakeboarding, and these are things I really couldn’t do.

So I bought a knee brace off of eBay, and put springs in it and made my own assistance-extension knee brace, and it actually worked really well. And I’ve been using this brace for years. And I did file a patent on it, fortunately. I had people asking me to make them knee braces, and every year I kept making a better one and a better one. And so I’d been thinking about this for years, and then I finally decided to build a company out of it, once I realized how many people would benefit from this and how prevalent this condition is. And it didn’t seem like anybody was looking to innovate in this space.