UToledo Student’s Patent-Pending Invention Supports Patient-Specific Orthopaedic Surgery

UToledo Student's Patent-Pending Invention Supports Patient-Specific Orthopaedic Surgery

Yogesh Kumaran had questions almost immediately after joining Dr. Vijay Goel's lab as a bioengineering undergraduate at The University of Toledo 10 years ago.

He was testing orthopaedic implants on mechanical test systems and in virtual environments. The lab uses computer modeling and simulation, the same engineering that verifies a bridge beam, a race-car chassis or an airplane wing can withstand real-world forces, to predict how implants will perform inside the human body. Much of that work has helped medical device companies generate the testing data they need for FDA market clearance.

"We use this technology to make implants safe for patients in general. Why aren't we using it for each individual patient?" Kumaran said.

A decade later, he has completed his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at UToledo and is finishing medical school. His clinical rotations showed him exactly where that question matters: the operating room, where surgeons decide how many screws a fracture repair needs or which implant will hold. Those calls rest on experience, with no way to test the repair beforehand.

His question has since led Kumaran to develop technology that lets surgeons stress-test a patient's broken bone and proposed repair before making an incision.

UToledo's Technology Transfer Office has filed a provisional patent on the invention, "Systems and Methods for Peri-operative Planning and Prediction." Rather than hand the idea off and hope someone else would carry it forward, Kumaran founded a company, the Ohio-based Ossatura Labs Inc., to reach surgeons and patients.

The company's product, OssPlan, is software designed to help surgeons better decide how to repair broken bones by adding computational modeling and data to their best professional judgment.

Rooted in Toledo

Kumaran didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. He set out to be a physician-engineer. Born in Pittsburgh but raised mostly in Toledo, Kumaran came up through St. Joan of Arc and St. John's Jesuit before enrolling at The University of Toledo, where he has completed every stage of his training, from his bachelor's degree to his Ph.D. and now medical school.

"I studied bioengineering in undergrad and I always knew I wanted to innovate in the medical space," Kumaran said. "Engineering felt like the perfect gateway. It let me be creative and come up with a solution but also apply it to the greater good and helping patients."

Goel's lab is where those two interests came together. Kumaran joined as an undergraduate and stayed through his M.D./Ph.D. initially under Goel, the renowned and pioneering director of UToledo's Engineering Center for Orthopaedic Research Excellence (E-CORE), who died in 2024.

"I fell in love with that research: studying human movement, understanding how devices and implants interact with the human body," Kumaran said. "I never joined another lab."

That decade of work gave him a clear picture of what the technology could do for an individual patient. "Why are we not taking a patient's preoperative imaging and testing different implants to make sure they will fit and hold up, based on that patient's age, body weight and bone quality?" he said.

What OssPlan does

OssPlan is software as a medical device platform: it takes a patient's preoperative medical imaging - a CT scan of a broken bone, for example - and builds a 3D computer model from it. From there, the software applies computational modeling and simulation to test how that reconstructed bone and implant would perform under real forces: walking, climbing stairs, sitting down and standing up and other everyday movements.

"Trauma is where we're starting, because no two fractures are alike," Kumaran said. "But anywhere a surgeon is choosing an implant for a specific patient, whether it's a joint replacement, a spinal fusion or an ACL repair, this approach applies."

Other tools already turn medical images into 3D models. Kumaran said what sets OssPlan apart is the physics layer built on top of that model, which effectively creates a patient-specific digital twin that can be stress-tested before and after surgery.

"That computational modeling piece hasn't been delivered to orthopaedic surgeons yet," Kumaran said. "There's no FDA-cleared product that surgeons can use for this today."

Several major device and startup companies are working on similar ideas, Kumaran said, but nothing has reached the market yet.

"They're all thinking about it. When we go to trade shows and I talk to friends in industry, they say it's coming one way or another," he said.

Choosing entrepreneurship

Kumaran said he could have let an established company license his invention or let the idea fade. Instead, he chose to build a company around it, a path he credits partly to Goel's example.

"Dr. Goel held 18 patents of his own and co-founded startups from our lab. OsteoNovus and Spinal Balance, which was later acquired, both came out of there," Kumaran said. "Dr. Goel's conviction in entrepreneurship was infectious, and that rubbed off on me early on. I love the idea that you're not just coming up with something that gets lost in the lab; you're translating it into real impact."

Ossatura Labs Inc., a Delaware corporation registered in Ohio, has secured an option to license the underlying technology from UToledo. Kumaran leads a four-person team that includes a chief technology officer, a chief medical officer who is a practicing orthopaedic trauma surgeon and a business advisor who previously served as a chief financial officer at Procter & Gamble.

"We've mapped out a clear pathway to get this to surgeons with our regulatory advisors," he said. "With the right funding, we're targeting about five years."

Kumaran credits UToledo's participation in the National Science Foundation's I-Corps program - an entrepreneurial training program open to faculty, graduate students, medical students and undergraduates through the NSF's Great Lakes regional hub - with teaching skills no lab or classroom covered.

"It's free entrepreneurial training and I loved learning it," he said. "It comes with a little seed money too. We used that training and those funds to talk to surgeons and other stakeholders, go to conferences and trade shows, and do real customer discovery"

Ossatura Labs has also worked with Rev1 Ventures, the Columbus-based venture studio that runs Ohio Third Frontier's Entrepreneurial Services Program for Central Ohio and is a member of NVIDIA's Inception program for startups.

Support from UToledo

While Kumaran traces much of his inventor's path back to Goel and the culture in UToledo's E-CORE Lab, he also credits the mentors who've carried that legacy forward, including Dr. Carmen Quatman, an orthopaedic surgeon who came up through Goel's lab herself more than a decade ago.

"Just being in that lab, getting that undergraduate research experience, and surrounding myself with students and alumni who went on to do big things in academia and Industry; you don't get that sort of experience anywhere else," Kumaran said.

Kumaran also pointed to UToledo's Technology Transfer Office and business incubator as key partners as he's moved the idea from the lab toward a company.

"They're folks who are genuinely excited about new technology and willing to support students who want to take that leap," he said. "It's a scary leap, but they'll tell you straight: 'you should do this,' or 'maybe don't do that.' "

What's next

On Thursday, Oct. 29, Kumaran will pitch his invention to investors as one of five finalists chosen for the Tech 419 Pitch Competition as he continues to build the startup.

Kumaran has less than two years of medical school left, with his sights set on matching into an orthopaedic surgery residency.

When asked what advice he'd offer other students with an idea of their own, Kumaran didn't hesitate.

"If a student has an idea, don't be afraid to take the leap because if you don't do it, somebody else will," he said. "Even if it fails, you learn skills through that process that you can't learn in a textbook. That translates beyond a startup, whether it's business, engineering or medicine. Those are skills that can be applied to any facet of your career."