Weighty Matters: Medical Use Found for Fat
Weighty Matters: Medical Use Found for Fat
Feb. 27, 2001 -- At last there is an upside to America's expanding backsides. Human fat is a more-than-plentiful source of cells needed to repair damaged joints, according to a presentation today at the annual meeting of the Orthopedic Research Society in San Francisco.
Cartilage is the thin, hard, flexible coating that gives major joints the strength and protection they need. These workhorse tissues aren't directly connected to nourishing blood vessels, so once they are damaged they can't repair themselves -- as many former football players know only too well.
Surgeons have few options for repairing damaged cartilage. They can transplant it from one place to another -- or they can take some healthy cartilage cells and grow them outside the body for later injection into a damaged joint.
Recent studies also show that stem cells in the bone marrow, which have the potential to form into any bodily cells, might also be used. But all of these approaches suffer from the same problem: It is hard to get enough new cartilage cells.
"There is no shortage of fat -- we all have plenty of cells to spare for this kind of procedure," study leader Farshid Guilak, PhD, tells WebMD. "The cells that normally [turn] into fat cells can go down a number of other pathways. They can produce cartilage under certain conditions."
Guilak, director of orthopaedic research at Duke University in Durham, N.C., gets fat cells by liposuction and can harvest about a billion of the specific cells he wants from about two ounces of human fat. "Having so many cells eliminates many of the problems," he notes. "And we can always take another couple of ounces."
Barbara D. Boyan, PhD, is director of orthopaedic research at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in San Antonio. She tells WebMD that the Guilak team's findings -- if borne out by further study -- would be a boon to orthopaedic surgeons.
"Usually the size of the defect that needs to be fixed is bigger than the number of cells you can get from your own body," Boyan says. "When you put these cells into a defect in the knee, for example, the cells not only have to recover and then to do all the things they do well, but now they have to fix this defect as well. The goal is to get an endless supply of cells so you have something to work with."
Weighty Matters: Medical Use Found for Fat
Cartilage is the thin, hard, flexible coating that gives major joints the strength and protection they need. These workhorse tissues aren't directly connected to nourishing blood vessels, so once they are damaged they can't repair themselves -- as many former football players know only too well.
Surgeons have few options for repairing damaged cartilage. They can transplant it from one place to another -- or they can take some healthy cartilage cells and grow them outside the body for later injection into a damaged joint.
Recent studies also show that stem cells in the bone marrow, which have the potential to form into any bodily cells, might also be used. But all of these approaches suffer from the same problem: It is hard to get enough new cartilage cells.
"There is no shortage of fat -- we all have plenty of cells to spare for this kind of procedure," study leader Farshid Guilak, PhD, tells WebMD. "The cells that normally [turn] into fat cells can go down a number of other pathways. They can produce cartilage under certain conditions."
Guilak, director of orthopaedic research at Duke University in Durham, N.C., gets fat cells by liposuction and can harvest about a billion of the specific cells he wants from about two ounces of human fat. "Having so many cells eliminates many of the problems," he notes. "And we can always take another couple of ounces."
Barbara D. Boyan, PhD, is director of orthopaedic research at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in San Antonio. She tells WebMD that the Guilak team's findings -- if borne out by further study -- would be a boon to orthopaedic surgeons.
"Usually the size of the defect that needs to be fixed is bigger than the number of cells you can get from your own body," Boyan says. "When you put these cells into a defect in the knee, for example, the cells not only have to recover and then to do all the things they do well, but now they have to fix this defect as well. The goal is to get an endless supply of cells so you have something to work with."