Rice Lab Gets Leg Up on Replacement

[Celebration]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/health/3747377.html

Researchers in Houston and elsewhere have come close to clearing the biggest hurdles to replacing worn-out and damaged cartilage — the tissue that covers bones in joints — with human cartilage engineered in the lab.

The deterioration of cartilage, which cushions the bones in knees and other joints, leads to severe pain for arthritis patients. About 200,000 arthritis sufferers in the United States undergo full knee replacements each year.

"I have been researching this area of cartilage since 1984, and this is the most excited I have ever been about the work," said Kyriacos Athanasiou, the director of Rice's Musculoskeletal Bioengineering Laboratory.

In this month's issue of the journal Tissue Engineering, Athanasiou's group describes the first successful method of growing and molding cartilage into natural forms without requiring scaffolds, trellis-like arrangements upon which cells are seeded and grown.