Duke alumnus Kishen Mitra, Pratt ’24, was named a finalist in the 2024 National Inventors Hall of Fame Collegiate Inventors Competition for his creation MyMeniscus+, an artificial meniscus implant.
Mitra — who earned his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering — was named one of five finalists in the Collegiate Inventors Competition, a national contest for undergraduate and graduate student inventors.
“This technology is an implant, but it [does] much more than just creating an anatomic equivalent construct,” Mitra said of MyMeniscus+. “It also accounts for a patient's demographics and parameters to be able to tailor the mechanical properties to their needs. That’s where the novelty and innovation lies in this product.”
MyMeniscus+ is an artificial 3D-printed meniscus with shock-absorbing networks that is tailored to each individual’s personal needs. Instead of having to receive a total meniscectomy — a procedure to remove the entire meniscus from the knee — a patient would receive this implant with the intention that it would both reduce the changes of later surgeries and restore their full range of motion.
The meniscus is a piece of cartilage in the knee that acts as a shock absorber. According to the Mayo Clinic, a torn meniscus is “one of the most common knee injuries,” but severe tears may require a replacement surgery called a meniscal allograft transplantation.
Typically, the procedure involves transplanting a donor meniscus into an injured knee. According to Mitra, however, the procedure has a failure rate of 25% within 10 years and 60% within 20. Moreover, he noted that when those implants fail, patients often need to go through multiple surgeries to replace them.
To address what he defined a “huge care gap,” Mitra said that he wanted to “leverage [his] design background … to develop a solution.”
“[MyMeniscus+] will be their new meniscus. Their new anatomy that can stay with them for the rest of their lives, as opposed to these other patch-up solutions that kind of exist in the market right now,” he said, adding that the device, due to the way he is “optimizing” its structure, would ideally reduce the chance of someone getting reinjured.
Mitra shared that he was inspired to develop MyMeniscus+ due to his personal and professional interest in sports medicine. During his time at the University, Mitra interned at a Duke startup, restor3d, where he said he was first introduced to personalized medical implants. From there, he said he learned more about the prevalence of meniscal tears and how allografts fell short of appropriately restoring biomechanical function.
Although Mitra shared that the product is still in the early stages of development and is not yet at the clinical trial stage, he remains confident the product will demonstrate a marked improvement from allografts.
Ultimately, he hopes his invention will push work on personalized implants in the broader field of orthopedics.
“I would just like to see more interest in the [personalized implants] space,” he said. “… I'd like to see a little bit more progress, a faster pace and working with the FDA to be more open to this sort of solution because it doesn't exist yet.”
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Ahilan Eraniyan is a Trinity sophomore and a staff reporter for the news department.