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 “As an orthopedic shoulder and knee surgeon and chemical engineer, I
think the combination of advanced materials and adult stem cells
holds great promise,” Dr. Cato T. Laurencin from University of
Connecticut in Farmington told Reuters Health. “For the shoulder, we
are looking next to bring this type of technology to clinical use
for the treatment of partial thickness and full thickness rotator
cuff tendon tears,” he said by email.
Rotator cuff tendon tears are common and often require surgical
repair, but most severe tears recur and require additional surgery.
Because tendons are made mainly of collagen fibers, with few cells,
they have little capacity for regeneration on their own, Laurencin’s
team writes in the online journal PLoS ONE.
To see if mimicking the environment in which tendons normally grow
would help repaired tendons to heal better than surgery alone, the
researchers tested an artificial scaffold embedded with stem cells
in a rats with a surgically repaired tendon tear. They compared how
well it healed to the same kind of repair in rats that had only the
surgery.
The tears repaired with stitches alone continued to show
disorganized tissue 12 weeks after surgery, while tendons appeared
much more normal after repair using the approach that combines
advanced scaffold material with cells to engineer ideal conditions
for tissue regeneration.
The addition of stem cells in the matrix, or scaffold, also led to
increased mechanical strength and more normal characteristics of the
replacement tendon tissue, compared with suturing alone, the study
authors note.
The stem cells themselves disappeared over time, suggesting that the
therapeutic effect resulted from their release of growth factors or
other signaling molecules, rather than from the stem cells turning
into tendon.
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“We believe they can change the local environment and make it more
compatible for regeneration,” Laurencin said. “The stem cells don't
have to become new tissue; they can work by influencing the
environment to make better, regenerated tissue. The use of a
nanotechnology based matrix is important in making it happen. That's
what this study suggests.”
“We are also developing this type of technology for use in treating
problems of the knee,” he noted.
“We believe that the future for tissue regeneration lies in the
combination of a number of areas of science and technology: advanced
materials science, stem cell science, understanding how physical
forces work in regeneration, developmental biology, and clinical
translation,” Laurencin said.
“The work presented here combines many elements of regenerative
engineering. The real successes will see not just using stem cells
alone, but the convergence of different technologies. This new
direction in thinking will provide exciting new possibilities for
patients in the years to come,” he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2nGrkUy PLoS ONE, online April 3, 2017.
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