New Cartilage Repair Scaffold Shows Promise, Study Claims

Forty patients with focal cartilage knee lesions were treated with a new scaffold populated with autologous bone marrow and primary chondrocytes as part of a multicenter study conducted at six hospitals in three countries. Seventy-two percent of their defects showed hyaline cartilage on biopsy at one year, according to an investigator who presented at the recent European Society of Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery and Arthroscopy Congress.

The procedure, which uses the INSTRUCT scaffold (CellCoTec; Bilthoven, Netherlands), involves a mini-arthrotomy and uses autologous cartilage and bone marrow harvested during the same procedure. The next step is to seed the cells onto the 3-D scaffold and implant the scaffold into the lesion, Wojciech Widuchowski, MD, said.

“Everything is a single stage during one operation. What is very important is there is no cell culture to this method,” he said.

Magnetic resonance imaging results show good defect filling and relatively good integration of the matrix, according to the study results. He said that adverse events were in line with or below the reported complications of other papers. The researchers observed some effusion and swelling, and two treatments were considered failures.

“In each score that we used, we observed statistically significant improvement,” Widuchowski said.