Originally published February 26 2006
Pittsburgh doctor experiments with stem cell therapy for treating cartilage damage
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Johnny Huard, Ph.D., director of the growth and development laboratory at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, believes that stem cells could soon become a standard therapy for cartilage damage.
They say they've been able to show that stem cells from muscle tissue, genetically engineered to express a therapeutic protein, can repair damaged cartilage in knee joints - at least in rats.
The approach "is a potential strategy by which to improve articular cartilage healing," Dr. Huard and colleagues concluded in the February issue of Arthritis and Rheumatism.
Dr. Huard and colleagues took muscle-derived stem cells from mice and used a retroviral vector to transduce them so that they expressed BMP-4, which they described as "a promising candidate for the promotion of chondrogenesis."
In the meantime, they created injuries to the knee cartilage of 12-week-old rats, which were treated with the modified stem cells in a fibrin glue, unmodified stem cells in fibrin glue, or just the glue itself.
Eight weeks after surgery, the researchers found that the rats treated with the modified stem cells had "glossy white, well-integrated, repaired tissue" while the repairs in the two groups of control rats "appeared patchy and only moderately well integrated with the surrounding normal cartilage."
The repaired tissue in the control rats was rough, there was a clear dividing line between the regenerated tissue and the original cartilage, and there were signs of osteoarthritic changes, the researchers said.
An important aspect of using stem cells to regenerate cartilage, Dr. Huard and colleagues said, is the scaffold - in this case the fibrin glue, which allowed cells to settle even into small breaks in the surrounding tissue and speeded the integration of the new tissue.
"Remarkably," Dr. Goldring commented, "the use of fibrin glue (as a scaffold) permitted some degree of integration of the repair tissue with the surrounding cartilage by 12 weeks."
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