The idea is an old one—but the technique is new. Medical researchers in Belgium are using stem cells from fatty tissue to repair bones. In a departure from the usual process, doctors at Saint Luc University Clinic Hospital remove a piece of fatty tissue the size of a sugar cube from the patient and use it to grow bone in the laboratory. They say that this is less invasive for the patient and the small piece of tissue contains concentrations of stem cells as much as 500 times greater than do samples from bone marrow.
Fatty Tissue Stem Cells Repair Bones
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Instead of attaching the cells to a separate scaffold of some sort, they grow them in a medium, form them into a kind of paste, and pack them into voids in bone—much like a dentist filling a cavity in a tooth.
Philip Blenkinsop, writing for Reuters, reports that doctors in Saint Luc have used this method to successfully treat 11 patients with bone defects that their bodies had been unable to repair. One patient was a 13-year-old boy who was able to participate in sports 14 months following treatment. Blenkinsop quotes one researcher as saying that, “It is complete bone tissue that we recreate in the bottle and therefore when we do transplants in a bone defect or a bone hole…you have a higher chance of bone formation.” The material can be shaped to fit defects or fractures.
Denis Dufrane, the center’s coordinator, told Reuters television that the researchers hope “to propose this technology directly in emergency rooms to reconstitute bones when you have a trauma or something like that.”
The Brussels researchers presented the results of their work at the November annual meeting in New York of the International Federation for Adipose Therapeutics and Science (IFATS) and published it in the journal Biomaterials. Blenkinsop quoted the organization’s president, Marco Helder, as saying that “it [the new technique] will have limitations regarding load-bearing capacity and, as with other implants, it will need to connect to the blood vessels of the body rapidly to avoid dying off.”
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This is a fascinating development. In my practice we've seen similar outcomes with the revised protocol. The key differentiator seems to be patient selection criteria. Has anyone else noticed the correlation with BMI thresholds?
Great point. I'd push back slightly on the conclusion, the sample size in the cited study is too small to draw population-level inferences. That said, the directional signal is compelling and worth a larger RCT.
We implemented a similar approach last year. Early results are promising but we're still gathering 12-month follow-up data. Happy to share our protocol if anyone is interested.
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