SURGEONS have replaced a shattered finger joint with an implant grown from
the patient’s own bone and cartilage cells.
“It’s the first such implant made from bone and cartilage,” says Volker
Kessler of BioTissue Technologies, a biotechnology company based in Freiburg,
Germany.
To make the joint, workers at BioTissue took cartilage cells from the
patient’s rib and bone cells from his hip. They grew the cells for four weeks in
a secret broth. Next, they placed the cells onto a three-dimensional “scaffold”
that matched the shape of the shattered joint.
“The scaffold is a biodegradable substance and it will degrade away with…
