Cartilage Creation Puzzle Closer to Solution

Researchers are not there yet, but they are closing in on the problem of how to create cartilage tissue. Now a team of scientists from University Health Network’s McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, report that they have generated articular chondrocytes and cartilage tissue from human pluripotent stem cells. It was not done in a body—but in a Petri dish.

The team claims to have succeeded in identifying the combination of factors that direct human stem cells to produce articular chondrocytes which are the cells that make the cartilage that lines joints. They reported their findings in the paper, “Generation of articular chondrocytes from human pluripotent stem cells“, published online May 11 in Nature Biotechnology.

The writers note that osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common type of arthritis and it affects 1 in 10 Canadian adults. There is no cure for OA and the only treatment for advanced OA is joint replacement surgery. An essential part of the joint is the cartilage which absorbs the impact of movement and enables the joint to move smoothly. Unfortunately, osteoarthritis causes the cartilage to deteriorate resulting in pain, stiffness, and swelling as a result of bone-on-bone movement in the affected joint.

“Articular chondrocytes are found on the surface of the bones within the joints and provide the cushioning that deteriorates in osteoarthritis, ” explained April Craft, M.D., assistant professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School. “If we can grow and use these chondrocytes to generate and maintain stable cartilage tissue, we have a tremendous opportunity to study the early events that lead to arthritis, to screen for new drugs to treat this disease, and to investigate how to use this cartilage to repair damaged joints.”

“This is an exciting and encouraging first step in producing functional tissue for joint repair, ” says Gordon Keller, M.D., director of the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine. “Working with our partners at Mount Sinai Hospital, the Arthritis Program at Toronto Western Hospital, and the University of Guelph, we are proceeding to transplant the stem cell-derived tissue into the joints of animal models to test its ability to repair damaged joints.