Orthopaedic Regenerative Medicine

Treatment of complex traumatic and wear injury in bones and joints remains a significant challenge for health care providers. Over 1,500,000 procedures are performed to correct these injuries each year at an estimated expense of $30 Billion in direct costs. Standard repair of complex bone injuries involve hardware fixation combined with bone graft to replace missing tissue. These procedures, though effective, carry risk for difficult complications including bone infection (osteomyelitis) and non-union healing. Treatment of advanced Osteoarthritis and other degenerative joint diseases requires replacement of the joint due to a lack of effective options to repair worn, damaged cartilage. Most of these surgeries are extremely invasive, painful, and often require protracted rehabilitation. For many patients, there is a distinct gap in care options between palliative therapies and surgical repair.

Arteriocyte is developing treatment strategies for orthopaedic trauma that employ its Magellan® System to produce cell-rich concentrates from the patient's own marrow for use in orthopedic surgery. This marrow concentrate will be used in conjunction with state of the art biomaterials and surgical techniques to stimulate osteogenesis for rapid repair of critical size bone defects. Similar therapeutics will be investigated in combination with minimally invasive arthroscopic methods to stimulate regeneration of damaged cartilage. These enhanced orthopaedic repair approaches are expected to ultimately reduce the likelihood of serious complications and improve long-term outcomes.