WOUNDCARE FUND — WEEKLY PERFORMANCE SNAPSHOT
WoundCare Fund: −4.12% NASDAQ: −0.49% | S&P 500: −1.42% | Dow Jones: −2.01%
The fund closed the week down −4.12%, underperforming the broader market. The pullback was driven primarily by weakness in a handful of small and mid-cap medtech names rather than a broad selloff across the portfolio.
Key Movers — Downside
CONMED — −11.28% Shares moved lower amid broader medtech volatility and continued investor sensitivity around surgical procedure volumes and capital equipment spending. Companies with exposure to hospital budgets and elective procedures tend to trade more aggressively when macro concerns resurface.
Tela Bio — −9.41% Tela Bio continues to trade with the typical volatility of small-cap regenerative and soft-tissue repair companies. Investor sentiment remains closely tied to revenue growth visibility and adoption trends for its biologic reconstruction matrix platform.
Organogenesis — −8.62% Weakness likely reflects ongoing uncertainty around reimbursement and utilization trends in the cellular and tissue-based product (CTP) category. Skin substitute providers remain sensitive to policy shifts, pricing pressure, and investor scrutiny around growth durability.
OPENING SHOT
Stryker Goes Dark. Medtronic Goes Shopping. The Market Keeps Moving.
Iran-backed hackers wiped 200,000 Stryker devices across 79 countries. Medtronic dropped $550M on a neurovascular access company. MiniMed went public. MediHoney got recalled. Smith+Nephew launched a next-generation foam dressing. FibroBiologics expanded into burns. And Healogics hired a development officer on its 30th anniversary.
This was not a quiet week. The Stryker attack is the one that matters most — not because of what it reveals about hackers, but because of what it reveals about how dependent the entire care delivery system is on a handful of suppliers. When Stryker goes dark, hospitals can't order surgical supplies, paramedics can't transmit EKGs, and 5,000 workers in Ireland go home. That's not a cybersecurity story. That's a supply chain resilience story — and wound care, limb salvage, and foot and ankle are not immune.
WOUND CARE
Leadership | Healogics Appoints John Landino as CDO — Eyes Growth at 30
Healogics named John Landino as its new Chief Development Officer on March 9. Landino comes out of Fresenius Medical Care and Tenet Healthcare, bringing nearly two decades of hospital-level business development experience. The hire is explicitly growth-oriented — Healogics is signaling it intends to expand its hospital partnership footprint heading into its 30th year. That's worth watching. Healogics manages over 600 wound care centers across the U.S., and its distribution relationships matter for anyone selling into that channel. A CDO hire with an acute care background suggests a strategy focused on deepening hospital system penetration, not just maintaining current accounts.
Product Launch | Smith+Nephew Launches ALLEVYN COMPLETE CARE — Five Layers, One Claim
Smith+Nephew launched ALLEVYN COMPLETE CARE Foam Dressing in the U.S. this week, positioning it as both a wound management and pressure injury prevention solution. The five-layer construction is engineered to absorb significantly more exudate than conventional foams while blocking more than 99% of bacteria from the wound bed. The claim that matters to clinicians: the unbonded multilayer structure reportedly absorbs up to 93% of mechanical energy, reducing pressure injury risk by more than 65% in supporting studies. International rollout across Europe and other markets follows through 2026. SNN stock dropped 2.9% on the announcement — which tells you more about SNN's broader market position than about the product. For commercial teams competing against this dressing, the pressure injury prevention angle is the differentiator to engage on clinically.
Regulatory | FDA Recalls MediHoney and CVS Wound Gel — Integra LifeSciences Takes the Hit
The FDA issued a recall on multiple MediHoney wound and burn dressings and CVS Wound Gel in 1-ounce tubes, citing packaging failures that could compromise sterile barriers. The recall was initiated by Integra LifeSciences, which identified production and process control issues affecting both product lines. As of December 19, the company had reported 11 serious injuries linked to MediHoney products and three linked to CVS Wound Gel — no deaths. Affected products include several MediHoney Calcium Alginate SKUs and CVS Wound Gel from lots 2446 and 2428. Facilities were instructed to pull products from clinical areas immediately. For competing calcium alginate and honey-based dressing manufacturers, the short-term opportunity is real — facilities that relied on MediHoney are actively sourcing alternatives.
Pipeline | FibroBiologics Extends Fibroblast Spheroid Platform Into Burns
FibroBiologics (FBLG) announced March 12 that it is expanding its investigational wound care platform — built on proprietary fibroblast spheroid technology — into acute and chronic burn injuries. The company holds 270+ patents across wound healing and adjacent indications, and the burn extension applies the same core biology to a market estimated at $2.55B globally, projected to reach $3.35B by 2030. This is pre-clinical stage work being positioned under a broader wound care strategy. Worth monitoring as a pipeline company, not a near-term commercial threat — but the fibroblast platform has credibility across multiple wound types, and burn care remains a category with limited differentiated biological options.
LIMB SALVAGE
M&A | Medtronic Acquires Scientia Vascular for $550M — Neurovascular Access Gets Consolidated
Medtronic announced March 10 it will acquire Scientia Vascular, a Salt Lake City-based developer of specialized guidewires and catheters for neurovascular procedures, for $550M with potential milestone payments. Scientia's microfabrication technology was built to address the access challenges in cerebral vasculature — enabling faster, more reliable navigation during stroke and aneurysm procedures. This is Medtronic's second acquisition of 2026, following the CathWorks deal in February at up to $585M. The deal closes in H1 FY2027 and is expected to be minimally dilutive before turning accretive. The BTK read: Medtronic is making a deliberate statement about consolidating the procedural workflow in vascular care — from access to therapy. Any company competing in vascular access needs to register what a fully integrated Medtronic neurovascular portfolio means for the competitive landscape downstream.
Capital Markets | MiniMed Completes $538M IPO — Medtronic Separation Takes Shape
MiniMed (MMED) completed its IPO on March 9, raising approximately $538M after expenses. The company priced at $20/share and closed its first day at $18 — down 2.7%, partly attributed to broader market pressure related to oil price volatility. MiniMed retained $309M of net proceeds; Medtronic retains approximately 90% of outstanding shares. The full separation is expected to complete by year-end via a split-off structure. The limb salvage relevance: MiniMed's separation continues Medtronic's deliberate portfolio reshaping. As MDT divests non-core assets, it focuses more capital on vascular and neurovascular acquisitions — the Scientia deal being the most recent example. A leaner Medtronic with a sharper vascular focus is a different competitive variable than the sprawling conglomerate of five years ago.
FOOT & ANKLE
Cybersecurity / Supply Chain | Iran-Backed Hackers Wipe 200,000 Stryker Devices — A Supply Chain Warning for Every Specialty
On March 11, the Iran-linked hacktivist group Handala claimed responsibility for a wiper attack against Stryker that reportedly erased data from more than 200,000 systems, servers, and mobile devices across 79 countries. More than 5,000 Stryker employees in Ireland — the company's largest hub outside the U.S. — were sent home. Stryker's main U.S. headquarters reported a building emergency. The apparent vector: attackers gained access to Microsoft Intune, the cloud-based device management system used across Stryker's global fleet, and issued a remote wipe command.
The foot and ankle relevance is direct. Stryker is a dominant supplier across orthopedic and podiatric surgery — Lapidus hardware, bone fixation systems, power tools. Hospitals confirmed they could not place surgical supply orders through Stryker during the outage. This is the largest supply chain disruption in medtech since the Change Healthcare attack, and it is still developing. If you are a practice manager, OR coordinator, or commercial leader dependent on Stryker inventory, the question this week is simple: what is your backup plan, and do your contracts require one?
The BTK read: The Stryker attack is not primarily a cybersecurity story. It is a concentration risk story. When a single supplier manages device MDM across 200,000 endpoints globally from one cloud console, a single credential compromise can take the whole system down simultaneously. The medtech industry has been building toward maximum integration and efficiency — and that efficiency has a failure mode. The orthopedic and foot and ankle categories — heavily dependent on a small number of implant suppliers — are most exposed.
THE SIGNAL
Consolidation is Accelerating. Fragility is the Price.
Three stories from this week connect to the same underlying dynamic: the medtech industry is concentrating faster than its risk infrastructure is adapting.
Medtronic's two acquisitions in six weeks — CathWorks and Scientia — are both access and workflow plays. The logic is sound: if you own the pathway to the procedure, you own the procedure. But Stryker demonstrates what happens when integration runs ahead of resilience. A company with 56,000 employees and $25B in revenue had a cloud console that could wipe its entire global device fleet from a single compromised account. The efficiency that makes Stryker essential to hospital supply chains is the same efficiency that made this attack catastrophic in scale.
The Healogics CDO hire, the SNN launch, and the FibroBiologics burn expansion are all organic growth bets in a market that is simultaneously consolidating at the top and innovating at the edges. That dynamic — scale versus agility — is the defining tension in wound care and limb salvage right now. SAWC Spring is four weeks out. The companies showing up in New Orleans with a clear answer to that tension will be the ones worth paying attention to.
Next week: Sanara MedTech reports Q4/FY2025 on March 24.
📅 Upcoming Events
March 17–18
Wound Care Today 2026 — Telford, UK
Hands-on skills, product demonstrations, 50+ exhibitors. European market focus. Useful for tracking where international adoption differs from U.S. dynamics — particularly relevant on NPWT portability and advanced dressings.
April 8–12
DLS/WHF — Diabetic Limb Salvage Conference — Washington, DC — MedStar Georgetown
The Diabetic Limb Salvage (DLS) Conference, co-presented with the Wound Healing Foundation (WHF), is the premier multidisciplinary event on diabetic limb preservation. Faculty include leading vascular surgeons, podiatrists, wound care specialists, and researchers.
🔥April 8–12
🔥SAWC Spring / Wound Healing Society Annual Meeting — Charlotte, NC
World's leading interdisciplinary wound care conference. This year carries more weight than usual: expect sessions specifically addressing the CMS skin substitute restructuring, site-of-care migration evidence, and the expanding role of AI-assisted wound documentation. Mark the calendar now.
See you next week!
-scott | Below the Knee
Below The Knee | belowtheknee.co Independent market intelligence for wound care, limb salvage, and foot & ankle.
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