Periprosthetic joint infection is the villain nobody wants to meet after a knee or hip replacement. It hides in plain sight, clinging to prosthetic surfaces under a slick biofilm shield like it just paid rent there. Surgeons fight back with systemic antibiotics, but it’s often trench warfare, long, ugly, and sometimes futile.
ForCast Orthopedics looked at that battlefield and decided the strategy was broken. Founded by orthopedic surgeon Jared Foran, MD and life-sciences entrepreneur Peter Noymer, PhD, the Denver-area startup has built the Wearable Intra-Articular Infusion System, WIIS for short. Think catheter-and-pump technology, but engineered to deliver high-concentration antibiotics directly into the infected joint over days, not minutes. It’s precise, targeted, and built to keep patients moving instead of chaining them to a hospital bed.
This week, ForCast Orthopedics announced the initial close of its Series A equity financing. The amount is undisclosed, but the lead investor speaks volumes: Ortho Innovations LLC. Its Managing Partner, Charles A. DeCook, MD, isn’t just writing a check, he’s joining as Chief Innovation Officer and a board member. That’s more than capital; that’s operational firepower from someone who’s been deep in the orthopedic trenches.
The company’s lead program, FC001, already carries FDA Orphan Drug and Qualified Infectious Disease Product designations. Those aren’t just plaques for the wall, they open regulatory doors, extend market exclusivity, and signal that ForCast is solving a problem serious enough for the FDA to move the red tape out of the way.
Series A proceeds will push FC001 into first-in-human feasibility trials while scaling manufacturing of the WIIS platform. The initial market is knee and hip infections post-DAIR procedure, a space with about 60,000 cases annually in the U.S. and a market north of half a billion dollars. That’s before expanding into shoulder and other joint infections.
If they succeed, ForCast Orthopedics could change how the industry thinks about PJI treatment, moving from blunt systemic assaults to precise, localized strikes. It’s not just better science; it’s better business. Shorter hospital stays, faster recovery, and fewer revisions mean the kind of healthcare economics that make payers lean in.
The takeaway? Innovation in medtech isn’t always about inventing from scratch. Sometimes it’s about looking at a decades-old problem and deciding the tools are wrong for the job. ForCast is betting that precision delivery beats systemic saturation. If they’re right, the name will fit. They’ll have called it before everyone else saw it coming.
