Name: Michael Dale
New title: CEO, Axogen
Previous title: Senior vice president of structural heart, Abbott
Axogen said Thursday it has appointed Michael Dale as its CEO and director, effective Friday Aug. 9. Dale, a former Abbott executive, will replace Karen Zaderej, who is leaving the provider of peripheral nerve injury devices after 14 years as CEO.
Dale spent nearly eight years at Abbott but left the company early in 2024. The executive held CEO posts at the medtech companies GI Dynamics and Helical Solutions earlier in his career.
“He brings over 30 years of leadership experience in medtech companies across various therapeutic areas, predominantly a very good commercial experience, and his focus will be driving our commercial growth and boosting our move towards profitability and cash flow positivity,” Axogen CFO Nir Naor said of the new CEO on an earnings call. “And he brings experience from both small companies, larger companies, private and public.”
Dale’s appointment ends Zaderej’s long tenure at the top of Axogen. The company promoted Zaderej from chief operating officer to CEO in 2010. In 2021, Pete Mariani, then the CFO of Axogen, told CFO Dive that Zaderej’s actions enabled the company to survive the financial crisis.
“She took the company from about 40 employees to about 12, preserved our clinical programs, preserved a sales force of three and basically went door-to-door to keep the company afloat,” Mariani said.
Under Zaderej’s leadership, Axogen joined public markets through a reverse merger, increased its headcount to 428 as of the end of last year and grew annual sales to $159 million in 2023.
Axogen announced in January that Zaderej would retire from the company, forecasting a new CEO to be appointed by January 2025.
Zaderej, who will remain in an advisory role for nine months, is leaving on a high note. The company’s share price jumped 35% to $10.70 Thursday on the back of second-quarter results, bringing the stock’s total rise for the year up to almost 55%.
Revenue rose 25.6% year over year to $47.9 million in the second quarter, encouraging Axogen to add $5 million to both ends of its forecast. The company now expects full-year revenue in a range of from $182 million to $186 million.
Zaderej said on the earnings call that “growth was across all of our products.” Avance, a nerve graft product, accounts for around 65% of Axogen’s sales, but “it didn't outpace all of the other areas,” Zaderej said. Rather, the growth of Axogen was also supported by rising sales of newer products such as Axoguard HA+.
Avive+, a soft tissue matrix that Axogen fully launched in June, made a “modest” contribution, Zaderej said. The device replaces an older device that Axogen stopped selling in 2021 in response to regulatory issues, a fact that has helped Axogen partly bypass an administrative hurdle associated with new device launches.
“Our assumption going in was that we would need value analysis committee in essentially all accounts,” Zaderej said. “We have been pleasantly surprised in some, in that they still had Avive, the original Avive, ... in their systems, and they've allowed Avive+ to come in without going through a full value analysis committee.”
