From nose to knee

Cartilage Grown from nasal septum Cells helped Swiss men with Knee osteoarthritis

Anastasia Kuznetsova-Fantoni, N+1

Surgeons from Italy, the USA and Switzerland have developed a new method of treating osteoarthritis and tested it on the first patients. They grew cartilage from the cells of the nasal septum, and then planted it in the inflamed knee joint of two patients. 14 months after the operation, the patients' indices of the index assessing the course of osteoarthritis increased, which indicates an improvement in their condition.

The study was published in Science Translational Medicine (Acevedo Rua et al., Engineered nasal cartage for the repair of osteoarthritic knee cartage defects).

There is another method of treating injuries of articular cartilage, but with osteoporosis it is usually impossible to use it. With local minor joint injuries, surgeons transplant cartilage cells from a healthy area of the joint, but if you apply this method in a patient with osteoarthritis, the transplanted cells will develop poorly due to chronic inflammation in the joint. Researchers from Italy, USA and Switzerland led by Karolina Pelttari from The University of Basel noticed that the cartilage cells of the nasal septum proliferate better than the cartilage of the joints, so they decided to try to transplant them to patients with osteoarthritis. After successful experiments on mice, doctors tested the method on two patients with osteoarthritis: a 36-year-old woman and a 34-year-old man. Both patients were diagnosed with severe osteoarthritis of the knee joint and referred for prosthetics, but they chose experimental treatment.

First, a small amount of cartilage from the nasal septum was taken from the patients, and then plates of cartilage tissue were grown from these cells in the laboratory.

Drawings from the press release of the University of Basel nasalcartilage relieves osteoarthritis in the knee - VM.

The resulting cartilage doctors planted patients on defective articular surfaces of the knee joint. Magnetic resonance imaging showed that the cartilage had taken root. After 14 months, the condition of the patients was assessed using the osteoarthritis course index (Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score, KOOS). All indicators of this index (pain, symptoms, quality of life) in participants increased by 20-30 units on a 100-point scale. Such results indicate an improvement in the course of osteoarthritis.

MRI of the knee joint: e – before surgery, f – after surgery. Figure from the article by Acevedo Rua et al.

To fully evaluate the effectiveness of this treatment method, it will be necessary to conduct studies on a larger number of patients. Pelttari's team recently received approval from the ethics committee to conduct clinical trials of their method on 15 patients with osteoarthritis, and if everything goes well, 64 more patients will be involved in the research.

Recently, American doctors suggested treating osteoarthritis with an antidepressant. They found that the antidepressant paroxetine can stop and even partially reverse the destruction of cartilage.

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