Keele scientist to investigate "grow-your-own cartilage" surgery
A Keele scientist is to investigate a groundbreaking type of cartilage repair surgery which offers relief to hundreds of young people who have damaged their knees after a sports injury.
Although the surgical technique known as ACI (autologous chondrocyte implantation) works by "growing" a patient's cartilage cells in the lab and injecting them back into the damaged cartilage, and enabling people to return a normal life after surgery, no-one knows why it works.
Now lecturer in the Schools of Life Sciences and Medicine at Keele University, Dr Nikki Goodstone, is to carry out a two-year research study to try to find out more about the repair process involved. Medical research charity the Arthritis Research Campaign, which funded preliminary investigative work into ACI, is also funding Dr Goodstone's research, with a grant of £93,231.
Dr Goodstone will be collaborating with orthopaedic surgeon James Richardson and clinical scientists Dr Sally Roberts and Dr Brian Ashton at the Robert Jones and Agnes Jones Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry, where more than 200 ACI operations have been carried out since 1996.
"To date, clinical results of ACI are very encouraging, even if we don't fully understand how the repair process works, or if the "new" cartilage is the same quality as the rest of the joint," says Dr Goodstone.
She will carry out detailed studies of very small pieces of cartilage removed from a patient a year after surgery. In particular she will be looking at the role of carbohydrates called GAGS, which play an important role in the maintenance of healthy cartilage, enabling it to act as a shock absorber. Dr Goodstone previously worked in the US where she helped to develop a new procedure for studying GAGS in detail. She now plans to study the GAGS in ACI cartilage, and compare the results with normal healthy cartilage, which will provide new information about the quality of the GAGS in repair cartilage.
The results of the research should enable surgeons at Oswestry to further refine ACI with a view to treating patients with osteoarthritis. Currently ACI is used on younger people with small areas of cartilage damage, buying time before they need a total joint replacement.
