News from the Orthopaedic Research Society

The recent ORS meeting in San Diego featured pretty good weather and lots of stuff about cartilage from contributors around the world. It will take several posts to summarize. Lots of people were talking about the Osiris study on using injectable stem cells for regeneration of the meniscus, which is the cushion of the knee joint. Non medical people sometimes call this the "cartilage", but I will call it the meniscus; the cartilage on this blog is the surface coating of the bone. Anyway, the cells did nada for the meniscus, which is too bad, but the investigators noticed there was some improvement in the cartilage, which is interesting. These are allograft stem cells, they come from a dead donor. I don't know if the injected cells seed themselves and grow, or if they just produce some chemicals (growth factors) that diffuse around the knee and help the other cells. This type of "co-culture" effect has been seen in the lab in other situations. Anyway, if there is something positive put out by the injected stem cells, that would be very, very interesting.