[4][5][6] Recent research demonstrates that articular cartilage may be able to be repaired via the percutaneous introduction of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC's).
[8] This study proved that the colony-forming units of bone marrow-derived stem cells were able to form cartilage once they were transplanted into a diffusion chamber.
As a result, that leaves a very small number of MSC's in the marrow as cells capable of differentiating into tissues of interest to joint preservation.
[11] Of note, this may be one of the reasons that commercially available centrifuge systems that concentrate marrow nucleated cells have not shown as much promise in animal research for cartilage repair as have approaches where MSC's are expanded in culture to greater numbers.
The knee microfracture surgery technique relies on the release of these cells into a cartilage lesion to initiate fibrocartilage repair in osteochondral defects.
[16] As the number of MSC's that can be isolated from bone marrow is fairly limited, most research in cartilage regeneration has focused on the use of culture-expanded cells.
Researchers evaluated the quality of the repaired knee cartilage after arthroscopic microdrilling (also microfracture) surgery followed by post-operative injections of autologous peripheral blood progenitor cells (PBPC) in combination with hyaluronic acid (HA).