The story behind Medtronic’s founding famously parallels that of Apple’s—it features two budding yet driven entrepreneurs, early business struggles, and a humble garage workshop.

While Medtronic’s founding lacks the cultural ubiquity of Apple’s, it is nonetheless a familiar narrative within the medtech arena. One of the more obscure facets of that tale, however, is the role academia played in the company’s inception (Earl Bakken worked with a University of Minnesota professor to perfect the pacemaker). 

Higher education institutions have long stood as meccas of knowledge, culture, and intellectual exchange. But they also have helped fuel technological progress by fostering collaborations between academia and industry. Without the scholarly community, such inventions as X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, electron microscopes, ultrasound, and PET/CT scanners might have never evolved. Similarly, the orthopedic sector can thank the scholastic world for breakthroughs like 3D printed implants, intramedullary nails, and reverse shoulder arthroplasty. 

Countless comparable developments currently are percolating in university laboratories worldwide. Read on for a sampling of today’s visions that could become tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

Streamlining Spinal Fusion

Bioengineering and mechanical engineering students at Rice University earned multiple awards over the summer and early fall for developing an integrated tissue retraction and suction device used in spinal surgery.

VacuTrac aims to simplify spinal fusion procedures by combining multiple surgical platforms into one user-friendly system. The device specifically is engineered to streamline the dissection phase, a typically laborious and time-consuming process due to its multiple operator and instrument requirements.

“Our target is simple—one operator, two tools, three jobs,” said Luke Yuen, a recent mechanical engineering graduate.

VacuTrac integrates a deployable suction tip directly into a traditional Cobb elevator, allowing one surgeon to perform tissue retraction and fluid removal simultaneously, eliminating the need for multiple instruments and operators. “With VacuTrac plus a dissector, a surgeon can manage suction, retraction, and dissection without constant swapping,” Yuen stated in an online Rice University video. “I like turning a frustrating step in someone’s day into something simple.”

Yuen and his fellow VacuTrac creators were finalists in the 2025 Collegiate Inventors Competition and received honorable mention recognition in the 2025 Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge. The students also won the Willy Revolution Award for Outstanding Innovation at the 2025 Rice University Huff Oshman Engineering Design Showcase event.

Metal Substitutes

A University of Missouri engineering team is working to end orthopedic’s long (and complex) relationship with metal implants by developing soft, smart alternatives using both synthetic polymers made from chemicals and biological polymers made largely from plant carbohydrates. These materials, according to Mizzou, can be tailored to stimulate bone growth, reduce inflammation, and dissolve after healing is completed.

“What we’re doing is trying to understand and leverage how the body can be guided to regenerate its own bone tissue,” associate engineering professor Bret Ulery said. “We want to convince the body to better heal itself.”

Such persuasion could come from micelles—i.e., biodegradable particles formed by peptide amphiphiles. Mimicking smart delivery vehicles, these structures can carry drugs, release bioactive signals, or even prompt stem cells to regenerate tissue. The engineers are building computational models to predict the ways in which different peptide sequences will behave, thereby accelerating the design of these micelles and other healing systems.  

The Mizzou team’s work is being subsidized by nearly $2 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Mustering More Movement

NIH funding also is bankrolling a project at Washington University (St. Louis) to help spinal cord injury victims gain more leg movement. Researchers there are investigating the neural mechanisms behind various controls of transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) in generating different leg movements.

 By developing a clear understanding of these mechanisms, researchers expect to develop personalized therapies targeting specific muscles that need the most help.

The interdisciplinary team’s research involves testing leg motor function in 48 patients with spinal cord injuries and some residual motor function. The investigators will test the ways different tSCS parameters affect leg muscle recruitment and voluntary torque compared with conventional tSCS and a no-stimulation condition.