Good news! This seems to be a promising approach! A company was already formed to commercialize this new orthopedic joint. It uses patient stem cells to build new cartilage.
"... to create a new biological knee joint that can last a lifetime, expand joint surgery to younger patients, and provide a better joint for all patients.
Two years into the project, ARPA-H has now given the team the green light to move into the second phase of development and begin preclinical testing of their “living knee” implant, called NOVAKnee. ...
“Our decades of research studying cartilage have shown that no other material has the same joint lubrication or load-bearing properties of articular cartilage. Based on this, we decided that we needed a strategy to regenerate a living knee, rather than simply replacing it,” ...
The Columbia design for this new joint looks like current metal and plastic replacement joints and will be surgically implanted with the same procedures. But NOVAKnee is a living, 3D-printed human organ, created with a biodegradable scaffolding material infused with stem cells. After implantation, the cells will regenerate the joint’s natural cartilage and bone tissues as the scaffold disappears.
The team identified new biomaterials and used them to design an implant that can sustain the loading of the human knee. The implant contains combinations of biomaterials to make femoral- and tibial-shaped implants, sized to the patient’s knee. Then it gets seeded with cartilage and bone cells, derived from stem cells either from the patient’s own body (lipoaspirate from the abdomen) or from adult inducible pluripotent stem cells. ...
To accelerate this breakthrough technology's path to patients, NOVAJoint Orthopedics ... has been established as an independent company committed to commercializing the NOVAKnee implant and extending the technology across orthopedic applications. ..."
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