14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists with the Columbia University School of Engineered and Applied Science say that they have successfully grown human cartilage in a laboratory using stem cells derived from fat tissue as their raw material for the first time ever.
The researchers argue that, since the cartilage that they have grown in vitro is fully functional, their achievement is bound to have a major impact when it comes to treating people.
Specialist Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic explains that, although functional pieces of cartilage had been engineered from young animal cells before, it has taken a while for the scientific community to be able to do the same using human stem cells originating from bone marrow or fat.
More precisely, researchers used human stem cells in such processes before, except that the cartilages they ended up producing were mechanically weak and, therefore, unsuitable.
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic and colleagues say that their success in creating fully functional human cartilage from stem cells derived from fat tissue is due to the fact that they have made the stem cells undergo a condensation process similar to what they experience in the body before they actually go ahead and for cartilage.
“Our whole approach to tissue engineering is biomimetic in nature, which means that our engineering designs are defined by biological principles,” the researcher says.
Furthermore, “This approach has been effective in improving the quality of many engineered tissues—from bone to heart. Still, we were really surprised to see that our cartilage, grown by mimicking some aspects of biological development, was as strong as ‘normal’ human cartilage.”
The next step for Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic and fellow researchers is to see how the laboratory-grown cartilage behaves when implanted into a defect.