Duke spinout Higgs Boson Health acquired
Key Takeaways
- Durham's Higgs Boson Health acquired by Pennsylvania company
- Digital healthcare team will join Globus Medical's staff
- Duke University spinout was supported by NCBiotech
Digital healthcare firm Higgs Boson Health, a Durham-based portfolio company of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, has been acquired by Globus Medical.
Higgs Boson Health's technology and staff will become part of Globus Medical's surgical intelligence team, connecting patient engagement, outcomes data and analytics.
Neither company disclosed terms of the acquisition.
Founded in 2017 and incubated at Duke University, Higgs Boson Health built a digital platform that guides patients through complex surgical journeys and recovery while giving care teams real-time visibility between visits. Today, the platform supports patients, caregivers and clinicians at scale, turning patient-reported insights into more informed and responsive care.
"We built Higgs Boson Health on the belief that what happens before and after surgery matters as much as what happens in the operating room," said Rajeev Dharmapurikar, chief executive officer and co-founder of Higgs Boson Health. "Joining Globus Medical lets us close that loop at a scale we could not reach alone, turning every recovery into insight that makes the next surgery better."
"We built Higgs Boson Health on the belief that what happens before and after surgery matters as much as what happens in the operating room. Joining Globus Medical lets us close that loop at a scale we could not reach alone, turning every recovery into insight that makes the next surgery better."
—Rajeev Dharmapurikar, CEO and co-founder, Higgs Boson Health
’Nandan Lad, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder of Higgs Boson Health and professor of neurosurgery at Duke, said, "As a neurosurgeon, I see every day how much of a patient's outcome is decided outside the operating room. With Globus Medical, we can put that intelligence in the hands of surgical teams across the entire medical, interventional and surgical care pathway."
Ziad Gellad, M.D., MPH, co-founder of Higgs Boson Health and professor of medicine at Duke, said, "From the beginning, our goal was to elevate the patient's voice in their surgical care. Every record a patient shares is a chance to catch a problem earlier and guide a recovery better. Globus Medical shares that commitment to measuring what matters and acting on it."
Higgs Boson Health received a $250,000 Small Business Research Loan from NCBiotech in 2019 and another $250,000 NCBiotech loan in 2020. The support helped the company enhance Manage My Surgery, its platform for helping patients and health care providers navigate complex medical surgeries, and to begin nationwide sales and marketing of the cloud-based platform.
The company also benefitted from NCBiotech’s Industrial Internship Program, which sponsors university students who are pursuing careers in life sciences to work with companies on important projects.
Seeking better patient outcomes
The integration of Higgs Boson Health with Globus Medical should help healthcare providers improve long-term patient outcomes, Globus executives said.
“Higgs Boson employs highly experienced teams of software developers and AI scientists who will be joining our team to power our vision of a seamless digital healthcare environment to simplify a patient’s journey through our healthcare system while enhancing real-time information and surgical intelligence available to healthcare providers with the ultimate goal of getting to 95% good outcomes at 10 years for all musculoskeletal surgeries,” said David Paul, founder and executive chairman of Globus Medical.
Keith Pfeil, president and chief executive officer of Globus Medical, said, “The acquisition of Higgs Boson and its digital solutions represents the next step in our strategy of enhancing the Globus ecosystem. As we continue to build out the ecosystem, the Higgs Boson technology will be part of our surgical intelligence pillar, bringing together outcomes and analytics in a closed-loop manner that fosters continuous learning, integrating along the full patient journey with the goal of improving patient outcomes.”
Globus Medical is a musculoskeletal technology company that provides education, clinical support, instruments, devices and other technologies to advance care in spinal health, orthopedic trauma and joint reconstruction.
The company, based in Audubon, Penn., reported worldwide net sales of more than $2.9 billion in 2025. Its stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GMED.
Read more about Higgs Boson Health
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