Mini pig cartilage trial brings new hope

With over a million knee and hip replacement operations carried out every year in the US –  the need to find a way to replace worn cartilage is vital. The result of a new study involving mini pigs, treated with cord blood,  has good news for sufferers.

In a study carried out at the University of Seoul in South Korea researchers set out to see if the remarkable cartilage regeneration potential shown by cord blood – when used rat and rabbit could be repeated.

And before starting a human clinical trial, they waned to confirm that the improvements could be consistently demonstrated when using a larger animal.   What they found was that after 12 weeks they were able to see that the transplanted knee resulted in superior and more complete hyaline cartilage regeneration compared with the control knee.

They concluded that these results could be the stepping stone needed to start a human clinical trial in the future.

You can read more here.