New tissue scaffold regrows cartilage and bone

For those of a certain age, growing new joints in place of arthritic hips and knees would be a godsend, much more attractive than cutting off the old joints and replacing them with mechanical joints.

New tissue scaffold regrows cartilage and bone - MIT News Office

MIT engineers participating in The Cambridge-MIT Institute have built a new tissue scaffold that can stimulate bone and cartilage growth when transplanted into the knees and other joints.

Lorna Gibson

The scaffold could offer a potential new treatment for sports injuries and other cartilage damage, such as arthritis, says Lorna Gibson, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and co-leader of the research team with Professor William Bonfield of Cambridge University. Together, they've filed a patent application for the process.

William Bonfield

The scaffold has two layers, one that mimics bone and one that mimics cartilage. When implanted into a joint, the scaffold can stimulate mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow to produce new bone and cartilage. The technology is currently limited to small defects, using scaffolds roughly 8 mm in diameter.

The researchers demonstrated the scaffold's effectiveness in a 16-week study involving goats. In that study, the scaffold successfully stimulated bone and cartilage growth after being implanted in the goats' knees.

Biomaterials are either modified natural or synthetic materials which find application in a spectrum of medical implants for the repair, augmentation and replacement of body tissues. One well known example is the total replacement of an arthritic joint by an artificial prosthesis based on appropriate biocompatible engineering materials.

While providing an effective solution for many patients, the outcome is often time limited. As a consequence, our research is focused on the innovation of second generation biomaterials derived from the biological template, and in tissue engineering, with the potential for enhanced, or even an infinite, lifetime in the patient.