Hopkins junior pioneers medical startups

Junior Param Shah, the co-founder and CEO of prosthetic and orthotic Baltimore startup Fusiform Medical, has been named one of Baltimore Business Journal’s 40 under 40. The annual list spotlights young business leaders in the city handpicked by the Journal’s editorial staff from a pool of more than 350 nominations and recommendations.

A high school service trip to the Himalayas served as a turning point in Shah’s career. During the trip, Shah installed sanitation and provided medical education to remote Indian villages.

“I worked with another nonprofit to do sanitation and lifestyle improvement programs over there, so we travelled through the villages, basically going to every village and building sewage systems, or improving lifestyles through seminars,” Shah said. “After that, I was in these villages and realized that there was a huge problem with disabilities. Almost one in fifty children had some kind major muscular disorder there, and basically I decided that something had to be done about it.”

While still in high school, he founded the Lotus Life Foundation, which aims to eradicate stigma associated with disabilities through the education of poor rural communities in India. The foundation has already built a school in Karanjveri, a rural area in the Gujarat region of Western India to educate children with disabilities.

“When I’m telling [Indian] parents that there is medical treatment that can help their child walk again, it’s something they can’t fathom. Lotus Life’s goal really isn’t to provide orthotics and prosthetics. It’s a means to an end, that end being eradicating the stigma associated with disabilities, so you can provide orthotics and prosthetics, treat a kid and show the community that he is capable of  becoming healthy,” Shah said. “It’s all about changing a mindset, and if you’re changing a mindset there needs to be education involved. So what we do is we try to partner with grassroots nonprofits to empower them to provide the treatment [the patients] require.”

Shah came to Hopkins as a Hodson Trust Scholar to study computer science when he met Alex Mathews, another Hodson Trust Scholar. Shah had been discussing with a friend how difficult it was to make an orthotic device that grows along with the child, rather than one that had to be replaced every few months.

“Alex just happened to be walking by at the time… Our mutual friend said, ‘Hey Alex come and listen...’ and so Alex sat down and we started talking. I was talking about using biomaterials, you know, something really crazy,” Shah said. “But Alex heard that and he actually called me the next morning and said, ‘I want to talk about this. I mean not using biomaterials, but I know what could work.’ And we started working on Fusiform that day.”

The idea was to make an orthotic device that could be cheaply and efficiently tailor made for every individual patient. Shah calls it “the Tesla of orthotic devices.” A doctor or clinician could scan the body part, and the orthotic could be 3D printed within an hour. The orthotic and prosthetic clinics that Param pitched the device to loved the idea.

However, Param not only wanted to change how orthotics are produced. He wanted to fundamentally change how medical devices were distributed to those who needed them.

“What  I really grew fascinated with was the supply chain. I like looking at a full company’s operations and putting it into blocks,” Shah said. “I looked into the orthotics and prosthetics supply chain and I realized that there wasn’t a problem with the device, but there was a fundamental problem with how these devices are made and delivered.”

Following this observation, Shah then realized that to reach the people most in need of help, he could make a software available to all companies building orthotic devices.

“We started working on a software mainly just to deliver our devices. Then there was another thing, why don’t we open up to all companies, to allow all of them to do it? Essentially, what we realized was that we could use our software to custom build any device, anywhere,” Shah said. “And that breakthrough happened about a month ago, and since then, every day has been play-by-play. It’s been a whirlwind. I’d say that was the seminal moment that we knew this company could be huge.”

Shah himself is surprised with the path his life has taken.

“I never thought I’d become an entrepreneur,” Shah said. “As I said, I was here to be a doctor. But I realized that you didn’t need to be a doctor to save people.”