Martha Murray is an orthopedic surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital. She figured out how to fix a torn ACL.

Murray was at a party in grad school when she first learned about the horrors of ACL reconstruction. "A guy came in on crutches and said he tore his ACL," she says. "I said, ‘Are you going to fix it?’ He said, ‘You can't fix it. You have to take it out and replace it with a tendon graft, and then do six months of rehab.’ I thought, Well, that seems kind of ridiculous." At the time, Murray was an engineering student, but she soon shifted into medicine, unable to get ACL reconstruction out of her mind.

The ACL, unlike other parts of the body, is indeed unable to heal itself. After 10 years of research, Murray discovered why: the same fluid that keeps the knee lubricated also prevents it from forming blood clots, and therefore bridges between bits of torn tissue. If she could create a different kind of bridge for the knee, she realized, she could make a torn ACL fixable after all.

Murray and her team used the same proteins found in the ACL to manufacture a sponge-like scaffold that surgeons would be able to sew onto the two ends of the torn ligament, giving a clot something to cling to and holding the pieces of ligament together long enough for tissue to grow back together. Because the new method wouldn’t require a graft, the surgery would be less invasive and the recovery time considerably shorter.

Early experiments with the scaffold have been encouraging, and Murray and her team recently received approval from the FDA to begin their first human trial. Once the scaffold hits the medical-device market, the impact could be huge. Hundreds of thousands of athletes suffer torn ACLs every year, and Murray’s work could save them untold hours in physical therapy and, collectively, hundreds of millions on medical bills.

Murray holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware, a Master of Science in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University, and a Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania.

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