Coming Soon To A Knee Near You: Cartilage Like Your Very Own

摘要

Basketball star greg oden hasn't metrnFarshid Guilak, a biomedical engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But as an insurance policy, Oden may want to send Guilak a few tickets each time his Portland Trailblazers play in nearby Charlotte. Oden was the first player selected in the 2007 National Basketball Association draft, yet he was sidelined his entire rookie season because of a bad right knee. After cleaning out damaged cartilage in the knee, doctors performed microfracture surgery, punching several tiny holes at the tip of the surrounding bones so that the resulting influx of blood would ferry bone marrow stem cells into the region; those cells, they hoped, would later differentiate into cartilage-producing chon-drocytes and repair Oden's knee.rnNow, several games into this year's sea-rnson, Oden s knee seems as solid as his monster dunks. But micro-fracture surgeries don't always help athletes recover. And they can't aid the millions of people with bad knees or hips due to more widespread cartilage problems, such as arthritis sufferers.