This Implant Helps Heal Knees With a Patient’s Own Cartilage

At first, Courtney Mannino blamed the dull ache in her left knee on a ligament she’d torn in high school. She ignored it as long as she could, but she had to cut her four-mile runs in half, then to zero when the pain wouldn’t let up. Soon the young doctor cringed at the thought of even navigating some stairs to get to work. The diagnosis was unlucky: cartilage damage too severe to be treated with cortisone shots and over-the-counter painkillers, yet not severe enough to justify the kind of knee replacement surgery reserved for patients with advanced arthritis and way more years behind them than Mannino’s 29.

With few choices, the Cedars-Sinai pediatrician decided to try a first-of-its-kind treatment from biotech company Vericel Corp., which specializes in tissue engineering. By employing a sort of medical scaffolding made of collagen, Vericel takes some of a patient’s own cartilage cells, multiplies them in a petri dish, and inserts the new crop back into the damaged knee. About a year later, Mannino says the improvement has been dramatic, and she can handle stairs, a bike, and, at the gym, an elliptical machine. “It’s not perfect yet,” she says, but “my pain is so much better.”