CARTILAGE REGENERATION BY AUTOLOGOUS ADIPOSE-DERIVED MESENCHYMAL STEM CELLS FOR THE TREATMENT OF OSTEOARTHRITIS

Background & Aim Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint disease mainly caused by wear and tear of the cartilage cushion between joints. Millions of people, especially the aged population, are suffering chronic pain and limited movement due to osteoarthritis around the world. Current treatment of osteoarthritis generally focuses on medication and knee replacement surgery depending on the deterioration level of the knee joint. However, medication has a limited effect on the symptoms and the patients who take the knee replacement surgery may suffer persistent pain around the replaced joint. In view of these limitations, numerous efforts have been made to find a more effective treatment, such as cell therapy to prevent the cartilage from deteriorating and reverse the course of arthritis. Methods, Results & Conclusion Here we show that in twelve clinical cases, the cartilage was observed successfully regenerating and covering the defect region in knees after the intra-articular injection with adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), and the treatment highly improves the symptoms of osteoarthritis. Basically, the adipose-derived MSCs from the patients are cultured and expanded to a specific amount with the optimized stem cell culture medium, the HELENE MEDIUM. After that, the cultured MSCs are directly injected into the injured knee joints of patients. The cartilage has gradually regenerated and been monitored by MRI photography in six months after treatment. Moreover, these patients showed improvement in clinical outcomes by measurements of the WOMAC Osteoarthritis index and Harris Hip Score. Based on the preclinical and clinical reports, except for replacement as chondrocytes, MSCs are able to secrete paracrine factors which take effects in modulating the microenvironment of the damaged sites, leading to an optimal condition for tissue regeneration. Also, further research will focus on determining co-injection of MSCs with differential factors could facilitate the cartilage regeneration. In summary, our results demonstrate the success in MSCs treatment of osteoarthritis by cartilage regeneration in clinical cases. We expect our findings of MSCs for osteoarthritis treatment could be a starting point in the field of regenerative therapy to more cartilage diseases and unsolved diseases.