Cartilage Repair Therapy Holds Promise for Arthritis

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Cartilage Repair Therapy Holds Promise for Arthritis

Health Media Ltd

05/17/2002

The work focuses on repairing the articular cartilage. Defects in this and

the underlying bone are often associated with osteoarthritis. Researchers

suspect that early tissue repair resulting in the restoration of damaged

joint surfaces may prevent the development of osteoarthritis, or slow down

the progression of the disease. Recently, researchers have turned their

attention to implanting expanded cartilage cells as a potential means of

treating the condition. This involves removing a patient's cartilage cells

from the damaged joint, treating them and implanting the expanded cells into

the joint. The main difficulty with the treatment so far has been that,

during the procedure, the cells often lose their ability to form useable

cartilage. Instead, the cells can only make low-quality cartilage tissue

that has different functional properties from the original articular

cartilage. Many existing therapeutic tissue regeneration methods could

therefore eventually lead to failure and sometimes might even aggravate the

damage already present, say researchers. Now a team at the biomedical

company TiGenix believe it has developed a technique that overcomes these

difficulties. The researchers have discovered specific molecular markers

that are used to predict the ability of a cell population to form the

required hyaline-type cartilage in the body. Using this information, the

team has developed a technology called ChondroCelect, which they say can

turn a patient's cells into the required cartilage and thus improve the

outcome of the implantation procedure. It will be a while yet before

patients benefit from the new treatment, however. The product is currently

involved in clinical trials at nine orthopaedic centres in Belgium, and

TiGenix expects it will be 2004 before ChondroCelect is launched

commercially.