Photo by Kelli WeldonAt Seton Southwest Hospital, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Scott Welsh is using a new medical procedure to repair knee cartilage damage in runners, weekend warriors and patients with arthritis.
Welsh said the procedure is available in two types—a surgeon can either transplant or inject mesenchymal stem cells that come from the patient's own body. In previous years, to add cartilage to repair a defect, a doctor would have to extract the cells from a cadaver or conduct two separate operations.
He explained a surgeon could take a biopsy of the patient's cartilage, send it to a lab that would replicate the cells and send back a syringe filled with cartilage cells six weeks later and then use those cells in a second surgery.
Instead, Welsh extracts the cells from the patient's pelvis and uses equipment to isolate the stem cells. He can then either inject the material into the patient's knee or surgically apply the cells in the form of a paste and use pig bladder as a graft to secure it, he said.
