Bristol tissue engineering experts move closer to radical osteoarthritis treatment
A team of Bristol scientists working on developing a "tissue engineering" programme to treat osteoarthritis are turning their attention to using human stem cells to regenerate cartilage.
Tissue engineering is still at experimental stage. Within a decade it could lead to a radical new form of treatment in which patients with the common joint condition, osteoarthritis, have their own cartilage removed, grown in a lab, and then re-implanted into the area of damage to prevent the further progression of joint destruction.
Until now the team at the Avon Orthopaedic Centre at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, have concentrated on developing tissue engineering techniques by using cartilage taken from patients' noses.
But with a new two-year grant of nearly £97,000 from the Arthritis Research Campaign (arc) they are now planning experiments to remove rare stem sells from patients' bone marrow or cartilage, so that they could be used for cartilage repair.
Articular cartilage and bone marrow will be taken from patients undergoing a hip or knee replacement because of osteoarthritis. The cartilage will be finely minced, and special stem cells removed so that they can be grown in culture in the lab. The crucial part of this long-term research will be make the implanted tissue grow into the natural joint tissue.
A similar process, known as autologous chondrocyte implantation, or ACI, is already used by surgeons to treat small areas of damage in younger patients with sports injuries, but this procedure is not sufficiently robust to help repair much larger areas of damage caused by osteoarthritis.
"We still don't know if cell-based therapies can be used to treat older patients with more advanced osteoarthritis, although we know that tissue engineering is an effective therapy for treating younger patients following a knee injury," explained Anthony Hollander, arc Professor of Rheumatology and Tissue Engineering, who heads up the research team.
"It's going to be difficult to persuade these stem cells to become cartilage cells but we're confident of finding a way because we know that they have an inherent capacity to grow into all cell types; our job is to understand how this process can be controlled."
