Perched on the end of the scientist’s green glove, the tiny oblong-shaped object looks like a small jewel. It is in fact artificially-grown human cartilage, developed from human stem cells in the laboratory for the first time.<br /><br />Cartilage, which protects the bone ends in joints, does not have blood vessels or nerves and does not heal over time if damaged.<br /><br />Scientists at Columbia University in New York took cells from adult bone marrow and developed them into cartilage as robust as the natural human tissue.<br /><br />“We do have technology. We do understand underlying principles. But we are not ready to go into patients. There is a lot of pre-clinical work that will need to be done to make this happen,” said Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, who led the study.<br /><br />Until now, scientists have made cartilage from young animal cells – but the resulting tissue was often weak.<br /><br />In the new study stem cells were condensed via a process that imitates how the body produces the tissue naturally.<br /><br />The research team now plans to test the cartilage grown from stem cells to examine its long-term effects.
