Peter Noymer

Right now Noymer runs ForCast Orthopedics, a four-person, development-stage company in Denver with an outsized to-do list: rewrite how medicine treats periprosthetic joint infection, the ugly complication that shows up when an artificial hip or knee gets colonized by bacteria. The standard of care is brutal and systemic. ForCast's answer is local and specific.

The tool has a wearable-tech name that gives away the engineering: the Wearable Intra-Articular Infusion System, or WIIS. Instead of flooding the whole body with antibiotics and hoping enough reaches the joint, ForCast pumps the drug straight into the infected space. Target, deliver, contain. It reads less like pharmacology and more like fixing a pipe.

That framing is not an accident. Noymer is a mechanical engineer by training, Princeton for aerospace, then MIT for an MS and PhD in mechanical engineering in the mid-1990s. His early academic work studied insulin delivered as an aerosol through a developmental pulmonary system. The through-line of a thirty-year career is right there in that first project: get a drug to exactly the right place, and most of the rest takes care of itself.

The pattern: build, prove, exit

Before ForCast, Noymer collected a resume that biotech recruiters dream about. He spent more than twenty years moving novel pharmaceutical and device products from a whiteboard sketch to an actual market. The companies kept getting bought.

He was VP of Product R&D at Alexza Pharmaceuticals, later acquired by Grupo Ferrer. He was CTO and then COO at SteadyMed Therapeutics from 2013 to 2017, which United Therapeutics absorbed. From 2017 to 2019 he ran Kedalion Therapeutics, a clinical-stage ophthalmology company that Novartis acquired. Three different organ systems, three different exits, one consistent operator.

He has not slowed down to do one thing at a time, either. He is Executive Chairman of PyrAmes, a Stanford digital-health spinout, a role he took in 2021. He co-founded and runs 153 Therapeutics, a UCSF spinout chasing small-molecule treatments for Parkinson's and other central-nervous-system disorders. Ophthalmology, cardiopulmonary, neuro, digital health, orthopedics. The constant is not the disease. It is the discipline of delivery.

Why joints, why now

Joint replacement is one of the great successes of modern medicine and also a numbers game. Hundreds of thousands of hips and knees go in every year, and the population getting them keeps growing. A small percentage get infected. A small percentage of a very large number is still a lot of people facing repeat surgery, long hospital stays, and antibiotics delivered the blunt way.

ForCast's stated aim, in its own words, is to modernize the standard of care for periprosthetic joint infections and improve the quality of life for that growing population. Noymer's version is more pointed: the molecules to kill these bugs largely exist. The unsolved part is putting them where the infection actually lives, at a concentration that works, without poisoning everything else.

A year of green lights

2025 into 2026 was a run of validation. In August 2025, ForCast announced the initial close of its Series A. The lead investor was OrthoInnovations LLC, run by Charles A. DeCook, MD, a serial entrepreneur and prominent orthopedic surgeon. Noymer did something shrewd with that relationship: he brought DeCook onto the board and into management as Chief Innovation Officer. The lead check and the clinical credibility arrived as one hire.

"We're pleased to close our financing round and thrilled to have someone of the caliber of Dr. DeCook as our lead investor," Noymer said at the time. He kept the momentum framing front and center: "Building upon our earlier successes in obtaining Orphan Drug and Qualified Infectious Disease Product designations from the FDA, we look forward to continuing that momentum as we work to bring our novel therapies to patients."

In September 2025 came an agreement with KORU Medical Systems to use its FreedomEDGE infusion system, borrowing proven hardware rather than reinventing the pump. In November 2025 the FDA granted QIDP designation to FC002, the company's second program, which pairs the WIIS platform with tobramycin to go after gram-negative infections. That sits alongside the Orphan Drug designation already secured for the lead program, FC001, aimed at gram-positive bugs. Then ForCast landed a spot in the 2026 MedTech Innovator cohort, a slot roughly sixty-five companies out of more than eighteen hundred applicants get.

Read together, those are the boxes an early medical-device company needs to check to be taken seriously: regulatory designations, a credible lead investor, a hardware partner, and an accelerator stamp. Noymer collected all four inside a single trip around the sun.

The engineer in the room

What makes Noymer worth watching is not that he is a scientist or that he is a businessman. It is that he is the engineer in a field crowded with both. He treats a clinical problem the way a systems person treats a leak: define the boundary, route the flow, measure what arrives. The companies he builds tend to be device-and-drug hybrids, which is exactly where an aerospace-trained mind earns its keep.

He is also, by track record, comfortable handing the keys over. A founder who has steered three companies into acquisition has made peace with the idea that the goal is the therapy reaching patients, not the logo staying on the door. That is the quiet tell of someone who measures success in outcomes rather than ownership.

ForCast is the bet that ties the whole career together. An infected joint is a contained space with a known enemy and a hard delivery problem. For someone who has spent thirty years asking why the drug has to go everywhere, it might be the most personal pitch he has ever made.

The team he assembled

Noymer did not build ForCast alone, and the roster reads like a deliberate balance of clinic and capital. The company was co-founded with Jared Foran, MD, an orthopedic surgeon who serves as Chief Scientific Officer, grounding the engineering in the operating room reality of treating these infections. Nick Jozwiak, CFA, runs the finances as CFO. And then there is DeCook, the lead investor turned Chief Innovation Officer, a surgeon who has built and sold orthopedic companies himself. For a four-person development-stage company, that is a lot of surgical and entrepreneurial firepower pointed at a single complication.

The deliberate part is worth noticing. A device that goes into a joint has to satisfy the surgeon who implants it, the regulator who clears it, and the investor who funds the years before either of those happen. Noymer has populated the cap table and the org chart with people who sit in exactly those seats. It is the same instinct that turned a lead check into a management hire: collapse the distance between the people who decide and the people who build.

Borrow the pump, build the medicine

One detail separates the ForCast approach from the usual hardware-first medtech pitch. Rather than spend years engineering a novel infusion pump from scratch, the company struck an agreement with KORU Medical Systems to use its FreedomEDGE infusion system. The proprietary work concentrates where it matters, the drug formulations and the intra-articular delivery, while the mechanical plumbing leans on a proven, cleared device. It is a classic engineer's allocation of effort: do not reinvent the part of the system someone else has already perfected.

That choice also shortens the road to patients, which is the whole point. Orphan Drug and QIDP designations come with regulatory advantages designed to speed therapies for serious, underserved conditions to market. Pairing those incentives with off-the-shelf hardware and a focused drug-delivery innovation is a strategy built for a small team that needs to move faster than its headcount suggests it should.