HOW can MSCs help us?
Throughout our lives, cartilage defects may happen and form areas of damaged or missing cartilage. These defects are the normally irreversible, since articular cartilage has very limited self-repair capability. However, cartilage tissue engineering by autologous cell implantation could help us to make new cartilage.
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Tissue cells (chondrocytes) are extracted from the patient’s healthy cartilage.
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Cells are expanded in petri dish for approximately four to six weeks.
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Once a sufficient number of cells have been obtained, the patient undergoes a second surgery where the cultured and amplified cells are applied to the damaged area.
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These transplanted cells grow in their new environment, forming new cartilage.
Image credit: Baugé, Catherine, and Karim Boumédiene. "Use of Adult Stem Cells for Cartilage Tissue Engineering: Current Status and Future Developments." Stem Cells International 2015 (2015).
