A Raleigh, N.C., man turned to a relatively new procedure to heal from a knee injury and avoid a total joint replacement, according to an Oct. 17 report from The Washington Post.
The 41-year-old man tore his meniscus after falling in 2019, and an MRI scan found an area under the knee where cartilage was worn away, the report said.
He went under a cartilage restoration procedure in September and has been recovering.
The procedure regenerates cartilage from a sample of cells taken from the knee and then grown in a lab, the report said. Once implanted, new tissue forms over time.
"It's the first procedure that uses a patient's own knee cartilage cells to try to regrow cartilage that has been lost or damaged," Seth Sherman, MD, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, Calif., told the Post.
The new approach was approved by the FDA in 2016 and has been used in other countries, the report said. It's unclear how many procedures have been done in the U.S.
Read the full report here.
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