Given ACL injuries are a fairly common injury and while not new to the world of science it is something that I think may be new to most of us here.
The research was done under the direction of Martha M. Murray, MD, and Braden C. Fleming, PhD
The Jist
ACL injuries are hard to repair and repair rates via suture have a very high (~90%) failure rate.
One of the issues that has been identified as a primary cause for this difficulty is the absences of a scaffold as such around the ACL. The lack of scaffold allows the blood that would usually form and clot in preliminary stages of healing, to be washed away by synovial fluid that surrounds the ACL. This results in no structure in place for the two ends to rejoin and no place for cells to remodel into a functional scar tissue..
The researches have essentially developed a way that combines a tissue-engineered composite scaffold with a suture repair.
"Use of the ECM-platelet scaffold also significantly improved both yield load and stiffness of the repair tissue; yield load almost doubled and stiffness increased almost 60 percent over that of suture repair alone. A randomized trial in a large-animal model found that the biomechanical outcome of the bioenhanced repair was equivalent to that of ACL reconstruction."- from http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/feb13/research7.asp
Links
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23857883
http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/feb13/research7.asp
While the studies have been completed in animals so far and there is still obviously a way to go before we see it pass human trials and become a common place treatment the hypothesis and research so far is looking impressive.
The research was done under the direction of Martha M. Murray, MD, and Braden C. Fleming, PhD
The Jist
ACL injuries are hard to repair and repair rates via suture have a very high (~90%) failure rate.
One of the issues that has been identified as a primary cause for this difficulty is the absences of a scaffold as such around the ACL. The lack of scaffold allows the blood that would usually form and clot in preliminary stages of healing, to be washed away by synovial fluid that surrounds the ACL. This results in no structure in place for the two ends to rejoin and no place for cells to remodel into a functional scar tissue..
The researches have essentially developed a way that combines a tissue-engineered composite scaffold with a suture repair.
"Use of the ECM-platelet scaffold also significantly improved both yield load and stiffness of the repair tissue; yield load almost doubled and stiffness increased almost 60 percent over that of suture repair alone. A randomized trial in a large-animal model found that the biomechanical outcome of the bioenhanced repair was equivalent to that of ACL reconstruction."- from http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/feb13/research7.asp
Links
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23857883
http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/feb13/research7.asp
While the studies have been completed in animals so far and there is still obviously a way to go before we see it pass human trials and become a common place treatment the hypothesis and research so far is looking impressive.
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