Ariston Medical is pioneering the development of scaffoldless tissue engineered cartilage implants to replace damaged cartilage in patients. Tissue engineered cartilage will fill a huge void in musculoskeletal medicine as it addresses one of the most difficult problems of tissue healing - that of articular cartilage. The principal of the firm was at Rice at the time of this SBIR involvementand had previously launched four small firms - including Ariston Medical - two of which had been successfully sold to players in the space. He is now Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Davis, and continuing his work on cartilage problems has gone on to develop a process that can fabricate tissue-engineered cartilage that is identical to the real thing, custom-shaped to fit an individual bone surface, that can be used to biologically resurface an arthritic joint.
