Orthopedic Invention Makes Collegiate Inventors Competition Finals

An orthopedic invention has made the finals in the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s 2019 Collegiate Inventors Competition^® (CIC).

The Collegiate Inventors Competition is an annual competition that rewards innovations, discoveries and research by college and university students and their faculty advisers.

The finalists will travel to Alexandria, Virginia, to present their inventions to an esteemed panel of final-round judges composed of National Inventors Hall of Fame^® Inductees and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) officials.

The inventions will also be showcased at the Collegiate Inventors Competition Expo. The expo will be held on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 2 p.m. in the USPTO Madison Building, Upper Atrium. The expo is free and open to all in the community. A private awards ceremony will take place later that day in Alexandria.

Lia Winter, a graduate student at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is the orthopedic invention finalist.

Winter’s invention is the EasyWhip™.

Winter created the EasyWhip to reduce the incidence of revision orthopedic reconstruction surgeries. As many as 20% of all orthopedic reconstruction surgeries (about 200,000 annually) eventually lead to revision surgeries. Winter is advised by Lynn Youngs, lecturer and executive director of the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Haslam School of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The EasyWhip double-loop stitching apparatus is designed to give surgeons more control over the process of stitching grafts. It is the first apparatus to leverage removable, connected needle portions, resulting in a new whip stitching method that improves graft accuracy and increases the precision, reliability of the procedure. In addition, Winter hopes, it will also reduce the incidence of costly revision surgeries and improve overall patient outcomes.

OTW spoke with Winter, who expressed her excitement about being selected as a CIC finalist. “I am truly ecstatic and honored to have been selected as a finalist for the Collegiate Inventors Competition. This accolade is incredible validation for my invention and for my company. I founded a startup, and I am pursuing commercialization of my EasyWhip invention full-time. I can’t wait for the opportunity to visit the USPTO in October to showcase my invention to the judges, patent examiners, media and public.”

Winter explained what inspired her. “Several personal experiences inspired me to work in this area.”

“I suffered a serious sports injury in high school, and I was fortunate to be treated by the esteemed orthopedic surgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dr. James Bradley. I made a full recovery, which motivated me to pursue biomedical engineering so I could develop treatments and technologies to help athletes like myself recover.”

“I attended The University of Pittsburgh for my undergraduate degree, and I had the opportunity to intern for an orthopedic medical device company, where I learned about product development and testing, and specifically worked with stitching tools. Around this time, my mom tore her ACL [anterior cruciate ligament], and she had to have two surgeries because the first one failed due to an issue with the stitching.”

Winter continued, “I’m very passionate about sports and orthopedics, and these experiences helped me develop my EasyWhip invention, with the goal to improve patient outcomes for ligament and tendon reconstruction surgeries. During graduate school at The University of Tennessee, I began to pursue intellectual property and build a business case for commercialization of the product.”