In a project that will likely be watched by football players, runners and other athletes, researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School say they are developing an injectable gel that could speed repair of torn cartilage, a common sports injury, and may help injured athletes return to competition sooner.
The technique uses the patient's own cartilage-producing cells and has the potential to be more effective and less invasive than conventional cartilage repair techniques, which may include extensive surgery, they say.
When the liquid mixture is injected into areas where cartilage is torn, such as a knee joint, the material hardens into a gel upon exposure to ultraviolet light, leaving the transplanted cells in place so they can grow new cartilage where it is needed.
The biodegradable material will be described in the Jan. 10 issue of Biomacromolecules, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
"Using a patient's own cartilage-producing cells, our goal is to place the cells into our new gel and inject them into the injury site so that cartilage grows where it is needed," says study lead author Jason A. Burdick, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
Burdick compares the procedure, in which the injectable liquid is turned into a gel, to "making Jell-O."
"We would eventually like to make a material that is as strong as cartilage in order to bear the load of the joint immediately after implantation," Burdick says, "but we're not quite there yet."
If those tests are successful, human studies could eventually follow.
Until then, no one knows how fast it will repair damaged cartilage in humans, but researchers are optimistic that it will be much speedier once the technique is optimized.