As per one of the US orthopedics research team, they are all set to develop an injectable gel, which can make the idea of self-healing of damaged tissues after a knee-injury simple and fast recovering option. With this new solution, you can have minimally invasive, inexpensive and practical option for repairing cartilage and preventing osteoarthritis. The team is creating hydrogel, which will be competent enough to repair issues like cartilage damages, regenerate stronger cartilage, and even could reduce or delay the development of osteoarthritis.
This will therefore reduce the need for treatments like total knee replacement. The same research team had previously identified precursor cells within normal cartilage, which in turn become mature over new cartilage tissue. This is really a surprising discovery since there was a notion of long-held assumption, which the cartilage can give few tissues in the body if these are not repaired. The very same team also was successful in identifying molecular signaling factors, which attract these precursor cells generally called as chondrogenic progenitor cells (CPC).
The research team was seen working with the model of cartilage injury, wherein the researchers loaded the custom-made hydrogel along with the SDF1. Together they then injected it into holes that were punched into the model cartilage. This subsequently applied the growth factor, which was caused by the cells in order to mature into normal cartilage that repaired the injury. This study was published in the known journal Arthritis and Rheumatology.
