Cartilage culture

Abstract

Defects in the articular cartilage can cause severe pain and may lead to marked disability with loss of both physical and social functioning. The majority of patients are young and in employment prior to their injury. Cartilage injury also occurs more frequently than one might expect, therefore it is important to find a method of treating these patients, who are clearly too young to consider arthroplasty. Advances in tissue engineering have allowed the development of new techniques, such as Autologous Chondrocyte Implantation (ACI), for dealing with articular cartilage defects. ACI is the treatment of an articular cartilage defect using cells taken from a healthy part of a joint, which are grown in a laboratory and re-implanted into the defect. It is a two-stage procedure involving an arthroscopic cell harvest and an arthrotomy as a second procedure three weeks later. In our series, 80% of patients with isolated femoral condylar defects report an improvement in their functional knee scores one year postoperatively. It is likely that further developments in tissue engineering will provide the ability to treat osteoarthritic defects in younger patients by methods very similar to ACI. Thus, in the future an even wider range of patients will benefit from cartilage transplantation