CARTILAGE

 

REGENERATION

 

in situ and in vivo   

Osteoarthritis is a condition that affects many millions of persons in the world for which to date there has been no effective treatment to resolve the complaint definitively and directly on the chondral lesion.

This disease consists of the gradual degeneration and destruction of the articular cartilage due to traumas and structural deformities of the joints and overweight. This process thins the cartilage through a phenomenon called apoptosis, or programmed cell death. When the surface area has disappeared due to the thinning, there is a grade I osteoarthritis; when the tangential surface area has disappeared, there is a grade two osteoarthritis. There are other levels of degeneration and destruction, which affect the deep and the calcified layers that border with the subchondral bone.

The clinical manifestations of the development of the condition are: increased volume of the joint, pain, crepitation and functional disability that, gradually and steadily, first hinders the performance of lengthy walks and forced flexion and extension movements, depending on the affected joint, and then pain and limitation of minimum efforts emerge as well as pain at rest which interrupts sleeping. If the condition persists without correction and/or therapy, the joint is totally destroyed, leading the patient to major replacement surgery with total prosthesis, or to disability.

Therapeutic methods for the correction of the articular cartilage lesions that appear during the osteoarthritic disease have been developed, but so far none of them have been able to achieve the regeneration of articular cartilage in situ and in vivo

 

Full Background