From the Popular Press: What Your Patients are Reading:

Traditionally, when surgeons repair injured knees, they take a small amount of cartilage and bone from another part of the knee, and transplant it to the injured area. However, now researchers have developed a patch that eliminates the need to transplant human cartilage. Called an osteocondral scaffold, the ready-made cylinder is engineered to mimic the composition of human bone and cartilage. During an arthroscopic procedure, the scaffold can be inserted into a drilled hole. The small device provides a temporary engineered matrix, and allows stem cells from bone marrow that can form bone or cartilage to impregnate the pores of the cylinder. After about 6 months the scaffold disappears, dissolved by the enzymes produced by the cells that attach to the scaffold. By the time the scaffold dissolves, it has been fully replaced by newly-formed bone and cartilage. These plugs, manufactured in England by Orthomimetics and approved for use in Europe, can treat lesions of no more than half a square inch of surface area. Another plug is currently approved for use in Europe, Canada, and Australia, and are now being tested in the US under the name TruFit BGS. 

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