You can harvest, grow, then freeze own cells for knee surgeries
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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – On average, someone undergoes total knee replacement surgery every minute of every day in this country. It’s a costly surgery with a long recovery, but there are alternatives, including a technique underway by surgeons at Ohio State that uses the body’s own tissue – grown and stored in a laboratory – to repair torn cartilage in the knee.
This technique, for those with limited damage, has been around since the mid 90s, but is just now catching on in the US. Over the last 15 years, 13,000 people have had their own tissue implanted into the cartilage on their knees, most of those surgeries occurring in just the last few years.
With the procedure, called autologous chondrocyte implantation (ACI), the patient undergoes two surgical procedures, the first to remove a small sample of undamaged cartilage cells, and a subsequent procedure a few weeks later to implant regenerated cells that now number in the millions.
Patients’ cells are put onto a type of mesh in the lab to grow and once the patch of tissue gets big enough, cells are frozen and held until it’s the appropriate time to proceed with surgery.
“We can harvest cells, send them to a lab where they actually grow and expand, and then we can actually implant those back into the patient,” says David Flanigan, MD, a surgeon at Ohio State University Medical Center who performs the operation.
Kris Weber of Columbus, Ohio is one of the thousands who have received cartilage implants. Kris has been an avid hiker for years, so when she injured her knee it did more than limit her mobility, it took away from her passion. Since she’d dealt with knee injuries in the past, she knew what kind of treatment she could be facing if she chose to undergo total knee replacement surgery.
“My mom’s had both her hers replaced, I had an aunt who had hers replaced, I’ve got friends who just had them done recently, and I don’t want to go through that again,” Kris says.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to. She’d torn a small hole in her cartilage, damage Dr. Flanigan, who operated on Kris, likens to a pothole. Luckily he was able to fix it by using a patch of her own tissue.
“After wear and tear, over time the pothole can get bigger,” he said. “The goal is to resurface – to give it a brand new “street,” in essence by filling the pothole.”
While they may still need to have a knee replaced someday, young, healthy patients with medium to large sized damage to their cartilage can benefit from this minimally-invasive technique.
“Dr Flanigan gave me my life back,” Kris says. “I was down to the point of not being able to do hardly anything, and now I can do the things I love.”
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References –
*Total Knee Replacement, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, Retrieved March 2010 from http://orthoinfo.aaos.org/topic.cfm?topic=A00389 (Key fact: 581,000 TKRs per year)
**About Carticel Genzyme Biosurgery, Retrieved March 2010 from: http://www.carticel.com/patients/about.aspx
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