Purdue student Carl Russell performs a test on a mouse bone as Purdue professor Joseph Wallace observes. (IBJ photos/Chad Williams)
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Purdue University’s new Center for Musculoskeletal Engineering in Indianapolis has a growth plan that metaphorically matches a healthy growing body—start little and develop into a robust system of bones, tendons, ligaments and cartilage.
“We’re going to start small,” said Joseph Wallace, the center’s inaugural director and Purdue professor of biomedical engineering in Indianapolis. “We’re building around the faculty that are already in this area. There will be some hiring initiatives to bring in new faculty.”
Wallace—who was an Indiana University employee before the IUPUI breakup in 2024—said the musculoskeletal center will for now largely be based out of the 2,000-square-foot Bone Biology and Mechanics Lab he leads in Indianapolis. But it is part of the school’s long-term strategy to build the center’s presence in Indianapolis through an emphasis on research, career learning and collaboration with industry and the IU School of Medicine.
Purdue’s 50-year master plan envisions 15,000 students in Indianapolis, which Purdue officials consider an expansion of the flagship West Lafayette campus.
But for now, the student body in Indianapolis continues to be a fraction of the count in West Lafayette, a reflection of the fact that the old IUPUI was much more IU than PU. This semester’s undergraduate and graduate enrollment was 2,659 in Indianapolis and 54,651 in West Lafayette.
The 18 academic majors available in Indianapolis have a distinct STEM and industry bent, with seven being engineering programs; other options include artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
Purdue is also integrating programs into corporate facilities such as the OneHealth Innovation District research hub at Elanco Animal Health’s new Indianapolis headquarters.
“We’re really focused on, as a part of a phased growth now, building much more in the research excellence,” said David Umulis, Purdue senior vice provost for Indianapolis. “It’s really about building up quality research with our partners.”
Musculoskeletal is an early area of emphasis for Purdue because of existing expertise and opportunity for expansion.
A broad term, musculoskeletal health focuses on the body’s muscles, bones, joints, tendons, ligaments and connective tissues. Conditions such as arthritis, fractures, back pain, neck pain and low bone density are common causes of pain and disability as well as sources of missed work and increased health care costs.
Wallace estimated about 30 Purdue faculty, between Indianapolis and West Lafayette, have work that relates to musculoskeletal health. But he predicted that will shift as he hires tenure-track faculty in Indianapolis.
The center—although yet without a permanent home—is designed to be a gathering point for faculty and their support structures to collaborate on research targeting bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments. It plans to eventually extend into research on muscle, spine and intervertebral discs, according to Purdue.
Related to increased collaboration in musculoskeletal research, Purdue is part of a consortium of academic institutions, businesses and research organizations led by Indiana University that last month was named a finalist in the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines competition, putting it in the running for up to $160 million in funding.
The consortium—called the Indiana Musculoskeletal Health Partnership for the Advancement of Care & Treatment, or IMPACT—seeks to increase collaboration with more than 100 entities statewide, including drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co., orthopedics implant maker Zimmer Biomet, industry groups BioCrossroads and OrthoWorx, and Indiana University Health and the Regenstrief Institute.
As part of Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, the center seeks to bring an engineer’s mindset to musculoskeletal health. For example, Wallace said he trained as an aerospace engineer but transitioned to biomedical engineering.
“I use material science and mechanical-engineering-related techniques and skills to study bone from the smallest levels of organization up to and including the whole bone,” Wallace said.
The goal is to understand the material mechanisms contributing to fractures and how to prevent them.
“When’s the last time you thought of the skeleton when you thought of diabetes?” Wallace asked.
“But the problem is, there’s a marked increase in fracture risk in diabetic patients, and when they fracture, they don’t heal properly,” he said. “There are things we can do to kind of treat those skeletal manifestations of disease before we lead to fracture.”
In focusing on expanding research in musculoskeletal problems, Purdue seeks to collaborate with the Indiana Center for Musculoskeletal Health at the IU School of Medicine. That center, established in 2017, has about 140 academic members, with about 20% representing Purdue.
Academic institutions have rivals and differing strategies, as with IU and Purdue in Indianapolis. But both universities are emphasizing cooperation.
“My hope is that they’ll have different cores that are more engineering-focused, or AI- or computer-science-focused, that will dovetail nicely with what we have,” said Melissa Kacena, director of the Indiana Center for Musculoskeletal Health and professor of orthopedics at the IU School of Medicine.
And at its most basic level, the human skeleton is a structure, making it natural for engineering inquiry. As a real-world example, Kacena said an orthopedic surgeon might have an idea about how to improve a surgical implant but needs engineering expertise to create a workable design.
“Every time we walk, we’re stimulating our bones,” she said. “So that’s another area that the engineers study.”
For engineers, venturing into a medical school and teaching hospitals in Indianapolis also offers something they often lack—access to clinical trials.
“The academic clinicians, academic clinical scientists, they’re the ones who have the bandwidth to really have access to the patients,” said Kevin Otto, who heads biomedical engineering at Purdue. “Even if we’re running the clinical trials, we need their access to the patients.”
Otto also noted the differences in culture and workflow between academic research in engineering and medicine.
He told the story of a past collaboration that provided a valuable lesson: “I had an anesthesiologist I was working with. I said, ‘Let’s go get coffee. We’ll work out a proposal and get to know each other,’” Otto remembered.
“And he said, ‘No, I don’t have time. Let’s write the proposal. If it hits, then we’ll get coffee.’”
The reason hit Otto: The demands of clinical care, treating patients required a different approach.
“So I learned, if you want to work across the aisle, if you want to work with clinician scientists and clinical scientists, you have to be ready to work in those domains.”
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