Cleveland Clinic, CWRU researchers harvest stem cells from …

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CLEVELAND, Ohio -- To make room for the metal and plastic of a hip replacement, surgeons have to remove and throw away tissue and bone. Now a team of researchers, including an orthopedic surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic and a former PhD candidate at Case Western Reserve University, has found what might prove to be a rich new source of adult stem cells amidst those normally discarded parts of the old joint.

These stem cells, which differ from those that come from the bone marrow, are great at building new tissue, including bone and cartilage, said Dr. Ulf Knothe, orthopedic surgeon at the Clinic and the leading clinical scientist on the study, which was published online last week in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine.

The cells come from the periosteum, or the soft tissue adhering to the surface of the bone like a skin, he said. They are called, unsurprisingly, periosteum-derived stem cells, or PDCs.

Knothes research team had shown in lab tests in the past that PDCs can regenerate bone and cartilage, but the cells are difficult to access. Unlike bone marrow derived stem cells, which can be harvested in a minimally-invasive way while a patient is under anesthesia, PDCs arent accessible unless a patient has a fracture or a piece of the bone is removed.

This study was particularly exciting because we were able to isolate stem cells from hip tissue that is usually discarded after a hip joint replacement, Knothe said.

Knothe worked with a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich as well as CWRU. Hana Chang conducted the research while a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering at the school.

There are more than 300,000 hip replacement surgeries in the United States annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most patients who have the surgery are between the ages of 55 and 80, and have osteoarthritis, a degenerative condition commonly referred to as wear and tear arthritis.

Knothe said it was encouraging to see that stem cells harvested from older patients who had signs of this kind of arthritis still had great potential to regenerate tissue.

The research team believes the cells gathered from a patients discarded hip replacement could be used to treat diseases or regenerate tissue for that patient when needed due to aging, infection, trauma or resection after cancer. This is safer than using donated stem cells because there is a lower chance of rejection in using ones own stem cells.

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Cleveland Clinic, CWRU researchers harvest stem cells from ...