Cartilage is a flexible connective tissue found throughout our bodies in places like joints, rib cage, ears and nose. Researches working at Colombia engineering have now recently announced to have found a way to grow artificial cartilage. Up until recently researches have been trying to grow cartilage using adult human stem cells, only for it to be weak and not viable for use. The team that figured out how to make cartilage came up with a different method, mimic the actual growth of the skeleton. In this method the cells go into a condensation state like in the human body. With this method the cartilage was able to act like actual organic cartilage. This study also helps because it shows new ways to possibly synthesize other cells of the human body.
Nos themes
Science is collaborative
Role of Motivation- Many different methods were tried by different people
Role of credibility- Researchers were with Colombia University
This is a great discovery, especially for arthritis; cartilage acts as a sort of shock absorber and people with arthritis have a lack of cartilage, cause pain from their bones hitting each other. People need transplants, like hip transplants, because the cartilage is all gone and their bones are grinding on each other. This might also have potential to build people new limbs, bone forms from cartilage and could be used to replace bones with future surgeries. For more info on cartilage and arthritis go here http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/arthritis/basics/causes/con-20034095.
ReplyDeletePersonally I have seen a lot of discoveries on stem cells lately, I think that this is awesome that we are using these transforming cells to fix peoples bodies.I wonder what these cells will be able to do for the future of our race. I found a cool link that shows a lot fo additional information on stem cells. This slideshow shows the general concepts on how stem cells work in the body from birth until death. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/stemcells/scintro/
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that all scientists are talking about now is stem cells. I find it amazing what we are capable of. I looked a little bit further into stem cells and found many different article but this one really caught my eye.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.timesdispatch.com/news/local/education/uva-professors-make-breakthrough-in-stem-cell-research/article_44bcd662-bc6a-11e3-8495-001a4bcf6878.html