4 minute read
Making the Medical School Journey Together
Pioneering implant inventor isn’t resting on his laurels
Inventor and orthopaedic surgeon, Frederick F. Buechel, MD’72, rose to fame for revolutionizing ankle, knee, hip and shoulder joint replacements. Together with the late biomechanical engineer (and Rutgers alum) Michael Pappas, PhD, he holds more than 150 patents worldwide. Their showstopper: “the New Jersey Low Contact Stress Knee” (LCS), the first system to use mobile bearings. Innovations mimicked nature better and increased range of motion, and replacements could last 15 to 20 years, instead of the typical four or five.
Buechel grew up in West Caldwell and North Caldwell, NJ, where he witnessed several accidents as an Eagle Scout. This spurred him to perfect his first aid training. “Putting it into practice inspired me,” he recalls. “It seemed like helping people would be a very good life.”
Wrestling landed him a partial scholarship to Seton Hall University, where the pre-med scholar won three metropolitan championships and five state championships. He then attended NJMS, meeting Pappas, a mechanical engineering professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology. The pair taught biomechanics to orthopaedic residents and a close friendship ignited. “We rode motorcycles and visited bars, drawing implants and instruments on napkins and tablecloths,” he says.
Buechel served as NJMS’s director of orthopaedic anatomy for nine years, and the cadaver lab helped the team develop and test the instruments required to implant their devices. Proximity gave them a boost too. “Other surgeon-engineer teams would maybe meet for a couple hours here and there,” he recalls. “But we hung out at each other’s homes and were like family. The constant contact let us rapidly evolve implant and instrument designs. We shared our specialties and sort of worked as one mind.”
Not all the progress was swift, however. The FDA required 11 years of clinical trials for the LCS—a first for knee replacement systems—which wrapped in 1991. “It was a landmark device and probably one of the longest-running artificial joints (1977–2024),” Buechel says. “Manufacturer DePuy Synthes, Johnson & Johnson’s orthopaedics company, eliminated it this year, much to the chagrin of many surgeons. The industry can be fickle, and driven by sales and marketing, which make ‘new’ appealing.”
Ironically, the team had improved the LCS in 1991, correcting bearings that would spin out for one to two percent of patients. But this tiny adjustment would have required more costly, time-consuming FDA trials. So the implant, now called “the Buechel-Pappas,” found fresh life abroad. “It’s the premier knee replacement in India, which installs around 1,000 of these monthly,” he explains.
People in India aren’t the only beneficiaries, it turns out. “We may be the only design team to ever have our own implants installed: a knee for Pappas and two hip replacements for myself,” Buechel laughs. “That might be a world record!”
The New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame inducted them both in 1998. They collaborated for 41 years total until Pappas’ death, the same year they updated their seminal work, “Principles of Human Joint Replacement,” in 2015.
A Floridian, Buechel frequently returns to New Jersey. He continues to explore his passion for alternative medicine, along with boating, fishing, squash, and scuba diving.
Technically he retired in 2023…but still wrote three papers. He often collaborates with his son Frederick F. Buechel, Jr., MD’95, an internationally renowned orthopaedic surgeon and expert in robotic knee replacements.
Daughters Bonnie Buechel, MD’17, and Kelly Buechel, ND (naturopathic doctor), followed him into medicine, while Holly, a national fencing champ, edits pharmaceutical videos.
Buechel used DePuy’s robust royalty stream to establish the Frederick F. Buechel Chair of Orthopaedic Research in 2002. “I stay fairly connected philanthropically to my educational institutions, but my big love is the med school,” he says. The endowed funds are managed by the department’s chairman, Joseph Benevenia, MD, a musculoskeletal oncologist who performs some of the most advanced surgical procedures to salvage limbs.
“The gift has helped the department in many ways,” says Buechel. “I’m very proud to have made this critical donation.”
An original New Jersey Knee is held at the George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences in the History of Medicine’s Special Collections.
