Article: Scientists Turn Fat Cells Into Cartilege

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Scientists turn fat cells into cartilage

Liposuction may offer repair material for damaged joints

By Maggie Fox

Feb. 27 — Scientists said on Tuesday a virtually limitless source of cells, from human fat, can be turned into cartilage, offering a good supply of repair materials for people with damaged joints.

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‘For patients with cartilage damage, we envision being able to remove a little bit of fat, and then grow customized, three-dimensional pieces of cartilage which would then be surgically implanted in the joint.’ — FARSHID GUILAKdirector of orthopedic research at Duke University Medical Center

FEEDING THEM just the right diet and giving them a comfortable gel matrix to grow in, the cells were coaxed into becoming cartilage instead of fat, and scientists said they hoped to one day use such cells to repair joints. “We have grown them into disks, something the size either of a dime or a quarter but thicker,” Farshid Guilak, director of orthopedic research at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., said. “Those are the appropriate sizes to implant back into the body to repair a defect.” The need is great. Cartilage does not repair itself very well, as it has no blood supply. When a person loses the cartilage from a knee or a hip, it usually is gone forever. Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Genzyme sells a kind of a patch and repair kit called Carticel that uses a patient’s own cartilage cells, but there is little else available for someone with damaged joints. “For patients with cartilage damage, we envision being able to remove a little bit of fat, and then grow customized, three-dimensional pieces of cartilage which would then be surgically implanted in the joint,” Guilak said. MSNBC's On the Cutting Edge columns

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“One of the beauties of this system is that since the cells are from the same patients, there are no worries of adverse immune responses or disease transmission.” Guilak and biomedical engineering graduate student Geoffrey kson started with stromal cells, which surround human fat cells. “These are the cells that normally would turn into fat if we left them alone in the body,” Guilak said. CELLS FROM LIPOSUCTION They came from people who had liposuction cosmetic surgery. “There is no shortage, certainly, in the U.S. population of fat cells,” Guilak laughed. The cells are not quite mature, adult cells, but Guilak said it was not clear if they were working with actual stem cells, which are immature cells that have the potential to become a variety of tissues.

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“They might be a little bit more flexible than other cells,” he said. These stromal cells have already shown they can turn into bone as well as fat. The secret of getting them to go down one road of development as opposed to another lies in the nourishment. “We fed them them growth factors, such as transforming growth factor beta, and vitamin C, which is very important for collagen formation,” Guipak said. “The other main manipulation was to put them into a three dimensional gel so that they retained their structural shape.” The type of cells they were trying to get do not appear if grown, as is usually done, on a flat piece of glass. What they got, and rather quickly, were chondrocytes — cartilage cells. They checked and the cells were indeed expressing the genes associated with chondrocytes as opposed to the genes expressed by fat cells. Bone marrow cells have been made to do this but getting bone marrow from a patient is painful, and only a few cells can be removed. Fat cells are plentiful and easy to get to. The cell transplants have grown in mice without reverting to fat or bone, but Guilak said his team wants to do more experiments before they test the cells in people. kson, who will present the findings to a meeting of the Orthopedic Research Society in San Francisco, and Guipak are working with Durham-based Artecel Sciences, which holds a patent on the technology. © 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

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[Guest guest]

Wow.... I have plenty for them to apply directly to my joints,

and still have leftovers!! : }

>From: " JHACHE " <jhache@...>

" Scientists turn fat cells into cartilage "

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