Date: Jan 09, 2015 Source: (
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I am afflicted with a rare and potentially devastating muscuoloskeltal disorder--osteoarthritis, a.k.a. degenerative joint disease, in virtually all of my joints. While many millions of people have osteoarthritis in at least one joint (it is the nation's leading cause of diability), I have it everywhere, which cumulatively is the mother of all orthopedic problems. Although the disease has progressed much slower than I originally expected, and is still in its early stages of progression after eight years, it's slowly getting worse.
Osteoarthritis, if you don't know, is degenation of the cartilage that lines the surface of joints. Cartilage is an amazing tissue capable of withstanding an enormous amount of stress when healthy, but lacks the ability to heal once damaged, so any injury sustained is permanent. The existing treatment options for osteoarthritis and other cartilage problems are generally ineffective and dangerous and have not advanced significantly in my lifetime.
Fortunately for mankind, a genius by the name of Dr. Kyriacos Athansiou, Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Davis, has astoundingly developed the "holy grail" of therapies for cartilage problems: 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. I have been following his work for years, but never thought I would see the day when this would become possible:
This technology, if made commercially availible, would revolutionize the field of orthopedic medicine and effectively "cure" the nation's leading cause of disability.
Of course, thanks to our political system and the kind of world we live in, the dream of clinicians being able to provide this therapy to the people who despeately need it is probably decades away from becoming a reality, and may well never become a reality in our lifetimes for use in most joints. The process of getting FDA approval is so torturous and expensive that I expect it to be infeasible for anyone to bring this technology to market anytime soon for anything other than the most common "indications," i.e. the joints most commonly afflicted with osteoarthritis. Because the FDA classifies arthritis of each joint as a discrete "indication," a new therapy would have to get separate approval for use in each one. With an average time of 15 years to complete clinical trials for any new medical product, and ~170 joints in the body, it will take 2,550 years of clinical trials before it becomes legal to use this technology anywhere in the body it is needed under the current system.
