At its Irvine facility, Axis Research & Technologies provides top-tier bioskills training for some of the medtech industry’s most prominent national and local players—Boston Scientific, Edwards Lifesciences Corp. and Applied Medical.
The 10-year-old company aims to shape the future of surgical training at its facilities, which offer hands-on surgical training, cadaveric research, medical device development and live-broadcast education. During a recent tour, the Business Journal got a glimpse of the 10,000-square-foot building in Irvine, which encompasses labs, conference rooms, surgery suites and a state-of-the-art training amphitheater.
“We provide the tissue, the cadavers and equipment, so pretty much all they need to do is put on their gown,” Chief Executive Jill Goodwin told the Business Journal.
Goodwin was appointed CEO in October after serving as chief operating officer for 10 years. She succeeds Nick Moran, who founded Axis and served as CEO since it launched in 2015.
Axis recently expanded its national footprint with the opening of a 10,800-square-foot facility in Houston this year, in response to client demand, adding to its other locations in Columbia, Maryland, and Nashville.
The company’s next stage of growth involves integrating next-generation technology into the operating room. In October, Axis announced a joint venture with the University of Maryland School of Medicine to open the nation’s first AI-powered smart surgical center.
Axis was also an early adopter of Omnimed, a medical technology company co-founded by Goodwin and Moran in 2022 that has developed the SmartOR—a surgical telemetry platform using AI to monitor and analyze activity in the operating room.
Broadcast Capabilities for Offsite Learning
The company’s Irvine headquarters has an amphitheater that seats more than 100 people for didactic training and classroom-style learning.
Axis can also live broadcast live and record across all of its facilities for those who can’t attend in person.
“You can have a hand shot, room shot or ultrasound X-ray broadcasted to doctors and students offsite with two-way communication, so they can interact with each other,” Goodwin said.
The facility’s main lab space, which can also be reconfigured into smaller private OR suites, accomodates around 100 people.
Technologies found in the lab space include C-arm imaging machines and equipment for laparoscopy surgery, a minimally invasive procedure that uses a thin tube with a camera inside to view inside the abdomen and pelvis.
“We’re pretty much able to get absolutely everything that a customer would like in here as long as we have a little bit of time,” Abel Vallejo, vice president of lab operations at Axis, told the Business Journal during the tour.
Vallejo said that Axis in the past rented a big rig that parked out back so employees at Edwards Lifesciences could do computed tomography (CT) scans on site.
“They needed to do CT scans right after they were done with the procedure because the validity of their results of their device needed instantaneous scanning,” Vallejo said.
A large part of Axis’ business is comprised of orthopedic and spine training, as well as cardiovascular, according to Vallejo.
Joint Venture with University of Maryland
Axis’ joint venture with the University of Maryland will grant the company access to robotics equipment that other bioskills facilities don’t have access to, according to Goodwin.
“It’s going to be a huge value add for our clients,” she said.
The planned 36,000-square-foot smart surgical center in Maryland will “blend the strengths of academic medicine with industry collaboration,” according to a release.
Axis and the university expect to break ground on the new surgery center in the third quarter of 2026.
There will be cadaveric and model training, immersive simulation suites and Omnimed’s SmartOR technology.
SmartOR is a System as a Service (SaaS) application that collects data from a combination of sensors, cameras and networked systems, totaling in more than nine million data points per minute.
Besides Axis, it’s currently being used within the hospital setting, providing staff with data such as inventory tracking, pre- and post-procedural analysis, and case efficiency and performance.
“There’s different players that go in and out of the hospital operating room, so there’s a lot of data that’s missing,” Goodwin said.
Moran serves as CEO of Omnimed while Goodwin is COO. Goodwin said that the leadership transition at Axis allows Moran to focus on Omnimed and her on the joint venture with the University of Maryland.
The idea for Omnimed came when Goodwin and Moran noticed their clients needed to streamline training and track it more effectively, leading them to spin it out into its own company.
Omnimed received Best in AI Innovation at Octane’s High Tech Awards in September.
Company 10th Anniversary
Founded in 2015, the company celebrated its 10th anniversary this year.
Goodwin and Moran, whose background is in martial arts and professional fighting, originally started Axis as a nonprofit organization to teach youths about obesity using cadavers. Soon after, he and Goodwin shifted the company into a bioskills lab model.
Before establishing Axis, Moran and Goodwin co-ran California fitness chain Primal Fitness Centers.
“We named ‘Axis’ after the center core of the earth; we want to be the center core of this industry,” Moran previously told the Business Journal.
The company took over its second location in Maryland from a medical device company, which had approached Axis to serve as a managing partner when it was acquired.
It quickly developed a customer base among locally based device makers, including Rancho Santa Margarita-based Applied Medical and Axonics Inc., a maker of sacral neuromodulation devices that was acquired by Boston Scientific for $3.7 billion last year.
“We really grew organically through word of mouth, and I think our reputation just grew because of the client experience,” Goodwin said.
One of the main differentiators between Axis and other independent bioskills labs, Goodwin said, is its nationwide facilities on both coasts.
“We try to find locations that are strategically located for our client,” she said.
The Times, an AI Czar and Anduril
Anduril Industries also found itself on the periphery of a major New York Times investigation of David Sacks, the artificial intelligence czar in the Donald Trump Administration.
The article, under the headline, “Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends,” said Sacks has invested in Anduril.
The article noted that Sacks in July hosted a major forum that unveiled an “A.I. Action Plan.”
“In September, Anduril announced a $159 million contract with the U.S. Army to build a new type of night vision goggles with A.I.,” said the Nov. 30 article that was written by five reporters.
Before the article was published, Sacks’ legal firm, Clare Locke, which specializes in defamation lawsuits, sent a letter on Nov. 24 to the Times’ deputy general counsel.
The Times threw “its last Hail Mary” by suggesting “that a $159 million contract between defense contractor Anduril Industries and the U.S. Army to work on night vision and mixed reality technology must be the result of Mr. Sacks’ influence,” the letter said.
“Their evidence? The fact that the contract was announced a month after the release of the AI Action Plan. It is hardly necessary to explain how ludicrous this allegation is. The Pentagon was already working with Anduril when the AI Action Plan was released, and Mr. Sacks has no involvement in military procurement.
“The Times has produced no evidence to the contrary. Its attempt to link these issues based purely on the timing of unrelated announcements is deceptive.”
In a post on the X platform, Sacks fired back at the Times’ article, accusing the publication of being a “hoax factory.”
For its part, a Times spokesman issued a statement saying it “remains confident” in the article and its reporters “do not have an agenda.”
