Can This 3d printed, personalized “Living Knee” Revolutionize Joint Replacement due to osteoarhthrits?

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. ..."

Can This “Living Knee” Revolutionize Joint Replacement? | Columbia University Irving Medical Center

NOVAJoint Orthopedics

Israeli artificial pancreas may one day cure diabetes

Great news if it is not hype! Fairly cheap and easy to implant!

"Betalin’s Engineered Micro Pancreas (EMP) ... The EMP does not jump-start a malfunctioning pancreas; it actually replaces it. The artificial pancreas “senses the body’s glucose level and the beta cells secrete the optimal amount of insulin,”

The EMP is implanted under the skin – usually in the leg – using only local anesthesia and quickly attaches to the vascular system. The process should take less than an hour.

Betalin is expecting a price of $50,000 per implant, ..."

Israeli artificial pancreas may one day cure diabetes - ISRAEL21c: The Engineered Micro Pancreas from Betalin Therapeutics is heading closer to clinical trials in humans.

Human Gut Microbiome On A Chip

Posted: 7/21/2019

The Wyss Institute at Harvard University may have delivered a momentous breakthrough by developing a very realistic, viable human gut microbiome on a chip. If confirmed, this has great potential for further and rapid medical progress!

“A research team ... has developed a ... ‘organ-on-a-chip’ (Organ Chip) microfluidic culture technology. ... now able to culture a stable complex human microbiome in direct contact with a vascularized human intestinal epithelium for at least five days in a human Intestine Chip in which an oxygen gradient is established that provides high levels to the endothelium and epithelium while maintaining hypoxic conditions in the intestinal lumen inhabited by the commensal bacteria. Their “anaerobic Intestine Chip” stably maintained a microbial diversity similar to that in human feces over days and a protective physiological barrier that was formed by human intestinal tissue. The study is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.” (S1; emphasis added)

Sources (S):

1. Human gut microbiome physiology can now be studied in vitro using Organ Chip technology/Anaerobic human Intestine Chip supports complex gut microbiome under low oxygen, enabling direct investigations of health and disease-related human-microbiome interactions (5/13/19)