A recent breakthrough tissue engineering method has potentially opened the way to future regenerative medicine solutions.
Cartilage of the knee joint, when severely damaged by age related wear and tear or injury or osteoarthritis, which is removed and usually discarded, during joint replacement surgery, could now be rejuvenated, becoming a potential source of cells for cell therapy through a disruptive technology that reverses aging.
Published in the Scientific Reports section of science journal Nature, the discovery has many positive implications.
A conversation between now deceased Professor Masatoshi Koshiba, (Nobel Laureate, 2002) and Dr Masahiro Katoh on whether his aging joints could be rejuvenated, inspired orthopedician Dr Shojiro Katoh to develop a path breaking EELS-TALC technique (Enriched with Essentials and Lapped in Scaffold-Transplant-suitable Autologous Leveraged Chondrocytes), making this accomplishment possible.
Aging of human body, its organs, tissues and cells is irreversible and in the lab environments, aging is much faster than inside the body.
However, EELS-TALC technology has disrupted this conventional belief by making tissues younger, through tissue engineering in a chemically synthesized polymer scaffold, under physical maneuver of orbital shaking in the lab, without genetic manipulation or animal derived products, thus paving way to solutions that, when similar environment is made available inside the body, such reversal of aging might be possible.
EELS-TALC method is safe as it does not involve genomic alterations, oncogenes, viruses, or complex growth factors.
Dr Katoh is now evaluating ideal transportation of tissues and cells between the hospital and the lab, based on the earlier reported OPTRACT method and additional safety parametres, supported by EELS, JBM Inc, GN Corporation and NCRM, India, before starting clinical studies.
