3. Stem cell recruitment
Who it's for: This might benefit all osteoarthritis patients, whether older or younger, says Jeremy Mao, D.D.S., Ph.D., co-director of the Center for Craniofacial Regeneration at Columbia University Medical Center's College of Dental Medicine and author of a 2010 study that used stem cell recruitment to replace missing joint cartilage in rabbits.
"But no one knows yet whether older patients will take a longer time recuperating from stem cell therapies than younger ones," he warns.
Stem cell recruitment has one big benefit over other therapies, Dr. Mao says. Because harvesting enough stem cells can be difficult, this provides a natural supply without invading the body.
It also allows the body to heal damaged joints with the patient's own stems cells, reducing the risk of rejection, he explains. (Cells grown outside the body and exposed to other materials, such as growth factors, could cause the immune system to reject them when they're reinserted into the body.)
"That's not usually an issue, however," Guilak says.
How it works: Columbia researchers inserted a protein "that has the ability to attract the rabbit's own stem cells into that location and regenerate cartilage," Dr. Mao says.
Three to four weeks later, the rabbits were hopping around the lab, but it took four months for cartilage to mature fully, he says.
"When we analyzed the new [rabbit joint] cartilage, it appeared to be the same kind of cartilage as in normal tissue," he says.
But whether stem-cell cartilage generated this way in people would have identical properties to original cartilage is unknown; it hasn't been tested on people yet.
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