Our TITAN MEDICAL INC COM NPV (OTCMKTS:TITXF) Thesis Is Going Exactly To Plan

At the beginning of the fourth quarter, we highlighted TITAN MEDICAL INC COM NPV (OTCMKTS:TITXF) as being one to watch. The company had a tough 2016, for reasons we'll get into in a little bit more detail shortly, but we theorized that a few things were set to play out during the final quarter that could set the company up for a recovery as it moved in to 2017.At December 30, Titan shares went for a $0.24 a piece. By January 3, this had risen to $0.35. That's a more than 45% gain to kick off the new year. The gains come on the back of the company announcing it appointed a new CEO; a CEO that will take over from current interim CEO who took over back in October when the previous CEO resigned.So what does all this mean?For those not familiar with the company, Titan is a junior medical device company, working on the development (and with any luck, eventual commercialization of) a surgical system called the SPORT Surgical System. It's essentially a robotic surgeon, as controlled by a real life surgeon by way of a surgical workstation. The workstation is an advanced ergonomic interface to the robotic platform, designed for controlling the surgical instruments and – concurrently – providing a 3D high-definition endoscopic view of inside a patient’s body.As we said last time, it's a neat device, and one that no doubt has a large potential market, but it's yet to pick up approval for commercial sale. When we last looked at the company, we noted that it had planned to carry SPORT through testing to underpin a medical device application to the FDA, but it had run into funding troubles and – as such – had to postpone this testing. We also noted that it had managed to raise around half of the funds it required last minute, and that this would likely be enough to get things back on track, and that the company could worry about the rest of the funding once the ball was rolling once more.As things played out, this is exactly what happened. Here's the announcement that pretty much sums up our thesis.So what's next?Well, it's all about getting this usability testing under SPORT's belt, and getting something down on paper that can prove the product's benefit to surgeons when the sales team head out to pitch the product. That is, of course, second to getting the product approved, but in general, these sorts of devices don't have too much trouble when put in front of the FDA. So long as there are no disasters in the user testing phase, things should be fine through to commercialization.We think the new CEO is on board with a view to getting the testing done smoothly, and the device picking up approval. He's a medical device guy, and he's had experience creating and selling medical devices like this in the past – considerable experience. When you're taking a device like this to market, a device that there's going to be a couple of competitors working against for market share – Transenterix Inc (NYSEMKT:TRXC)’s ALF and Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (NASDAQ:ISRG)’s DaVinci – then you need someone who knows what their doing. A look at David J. McNally, Titan's new CEO's, bio, suggests he does.By way of a brief look at the numbers, at last count, Titan had cash and cash equivalents at September 30, 2016 of $7.4 million, and recorded a net loss for the third quarter of 2016 at $1.65 million. There's an extra circa $1 million on top of this by way of an overallotment option exercised, on the back of a September 20 $7.7 million financing.We will be updating our subscribers as soon as we know more. For the latest updates on TITFX, sign up below!Disclosure: We have no position in TITXF and have not been compensated for this article.