Engineered cartilage, it sounds perfect! I can’t wait. This report out of Boston Children’s Hospital discusses research aimed at growing cartilage in a lab to treat patients with cartilage defects.
Current treatments involve doing a two stage surgery to take cartilage cells from a patient, grow those cells on a collagen membrane, and then implant it. The upside is that one receives their own cartilage cells. The downside is that they have two surgeries and they have to wait for those cartilage cells to “grow” and produce new matrix to protect their joint.
I anxiously await new technologies for cartilage repair.
Read more about the new research in this article: Engineered cartilage could turn the tide for patients with osteoarthritis.
(Photo from the article: Michael Goderre, Boston Children’s, Cartilage tissue generated from pluripotent stem cells.)
