Orthopaedic
Orthopaedic injuries can compromise mobility and therefore quality of life, and not just for professional athletes. We've been studying the forces on bones and joints for a long time, working on better ways to help them heal, on better artificial joints, and on replacement tissues for cartilage and ligaments. Much of what we've learned has already improved surgical and rehabilitation techniques for orthopaedic injuries. One of the first regenerative medicine treatments to become a commercial product, a scaffold called SIS that promotes the regrowth of tissue, is widely used to help regenerate shoulder rotator cuffs and knee ligaments.
Cartilage is one of those human tissues that just doesn't regrow on its own, thus more than 40 million Americans suffer from osteoarthritis, a painful degradation of the cartilage in the linings of joints. Not long from now, we'll have a new treatment in clinical research studies that takes a patient's own stem cells from a small muscle biopsy and uses a growth factor that encourages the development of cartilage. The cells will then be injected into arthritic joints to renew the cartilage layer without fear of the patient rejecting them.