PEOPLE鈥檚 jaws have been repaired using bone grown from their own stem cells,
in the first clinical trial of the technique.
Surgeons normally plug gaps in bones with artificial implants or chips of
bone taken from the patient鈥檚 pelvis. But the operation often leaves people with
persistent pelvic pain.
A better way is to grow new bone from an individual鈥檚 own cells, says Clemens
van Blitterswijk of IsoTis in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. His group makes
millimetre-sized granules of porous hydroxyapatite鈥攖he mineral part of
bone鈥攆illed with bone stem cells taken from the patient鈥檚 bone marrow.
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鈥淵ou can extract the cells easily from the pelvis under local anaesthetic
with a firm needle, says his colleague Gert Meijer, who used the implants to
repair jaw damage in 10 patients at the University Medical Centre in
Utrecht.
The extracted cells are left to multiply in a broth of nutrients. Then
granules of hydroxyapatite are added to the broth where they are 鈥渟eeded鈥� with
the stem cells. Meijer used these cell-filled granules of hydroxyapatite to
repair holes in the patients鈥� jaws. The patient with the worst damage had lost
three teeth and surrounding bone from the upper jaw. The implants were left to
grow for four months before metal posts were drilled into them for attaching
dental crowns.
After four months, Meijer says the cells not only produced bone within the
implanted granules, but also between granules, making the implant solid and
anchoring it well to surrounding bone. 鈥淚t鈥檚 exciting to get this into patients
and see it working so well,鈥� says Richard Oreffo, a tissue engineer at the
University of Southampton. The researchers hope the technique can be adapted to
repair much more serious damage.