0:00
My name is Lijie Grace Zhang.
I'm the director of the
Bioengineering Laboratory
for Nanomedicine and Tissue
Engineering at The George
Washington University.
In the following, I will give a
talk about integrating nanomaterial
and the three dimensional
nano/microfabrication
techniques for improved
cartilage and bone regeneration.
0:23
At the beginning I would like
to introduce some statistics
about cartilage bone injury.
So from this slide, you can
see only in the United States
over six million people
visit hospital because
of different joint problems.
And also, for the most
common, osteoarthritis,
may affect 33.6% of those age 65
and older in the United States.
And also bone fractures are
over one million each year.
The total direct cost related
to all of the osteoarthritis
is a huge number each year.
So considering all of that
cartilage and the bone injury,
currently there are a lot
of therapies available.
1:08
The traditional therapy for
cartilage and bone repair, at least
the stereotypical one, the
first event is autograft,
is the gold standard.
So autograft uses patient's
own cartilage and bone
tissue to replace the damaged part.
Another very popular
one is called allograft
It uses donor cartilage and
bone tissue like from a cadaver.
Xenograft uses tissue from
other species like animals.
For the very severe
osteoarthritis or joint damage,
so normally the total joint
replacement is the last option,
so the common replacement for the
hip and the knee replacements.
So, in addition,
currently there is a cell
therapy for cartilage repair.
It's called autologous chondrocyte
implantation, or ACI, procedure.
So this procedure is, first the
harvest of some cartilage tissue
from the patient's body and then
capture the chondrocytes in the lab
to expand over a very large
cell number over there,
and then inject the chondrocyte
back to patient's body.
So although all of these
traditional therapies
are available for cartilage and bone
regeneration, they are not perfect.
