It’s not every day you meet a practicing surgeon with a side hustle. And few people have a side hustle that involves developing surgical instruments, implants and joint-replacement procedures.

Both of these describe Dr. Peter Bonutti.

Peter the doctor has done more than 30,000 surgical procedures over the last few decades. Peter the product developer has more than 300 patents to his name and hundreds more outstanding applications. He runs Bonutti Technologies, a research and development incubator for new medical products. Over the years, he’s begun spending more time in his lab than in the operating room, but on any given day, you could catch fresh from a knee or hip replacement surgery.

“I have a pretty active mind,” he told me. “I’m always thinking if there’s some way I could do this procedure or that procedure better. I spend one week of the month doing surgery, and the other three weeks I devote to research and development. I’m very active in both.”

Peter grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, near the campus of the famed Cleveland Clinic. His parents were immigrants from Italy, in an area that’s now part of Slovenia. He was raised in a strict Roman Catholic family. He says he had two choices — become a priest or become a doctor. As it turned out, he decided at a very young age. Like a proto-Doogie Howser, he graduated high school at 15 and went off to the University of Chicago with a full scholarship to study medicine.

He returned to Cleveland to do his surgery residency at the Clinic. He remained at the Clinic for a lab fellowship, and when the lab was shut down, he put in a bid. Much to his surprise, he won. The only problem was he didn’t have the money to pay for it.

“I had 30 days to come up with the funds, and I couldn’t get a bank loan,” he said. “I needed a job, so I ended up moving to a small town in Illinois to join a that said they needed an orthopedic surgeon. They knew I wanted to go into product development and told me they’d loan me the money if I came. It wasn’t a hard decision.”

Peter has remained in Effingham, Illinois, ever since. From day one, he’s had his feet planted firmly in both his research and medical practices. His earliest patents all focused on surgical products and he’s gone on to become a pioneer in the development of robotic and navigation systems for replacement surgeries.  Since launching the lab in 1990, he’s started several medical companies of his own while licensing technologies to dozens of medical device companies in both the U.S. and abroad. Most recently, he co-founded UVCeed, a company that produces a smart UVC disinfection system that helps stop the spread of disease.

“This was before the pandemic,” he said. “And during the lockdown, we started thinking, ‘this is oddly timely, right now,’ so we really put our focus into that.”

And all the while, he continues to practice medicine.

“I’m still very excited and honored to be able to treat patients,” he said. “It’s one of the greatest things when someone comes to you and trusts you to fix their knee. Then they tell you that you helped them get back to normal. That’s why I do this.”