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I’m at the CSU Havemeyer Symposium on orthobiologics this morning. This marks the opening of the C. Wayne McIlwraith Translational Medicine Institute (TMI). How does all of this intersect with what I do?

Our Work with CSU

Way back when in 2004, I wanted to begin using mesenchymal stem cells to treat our patients with spine pain, I sat down at a computer to search to find someone in our local area who knew what to do with this stuff. I soon found John Kisiday, a new professor at CSU. After meeting with John, it became clear that CSU had just begun using MSCs to treat athletic horses and the rest was history. We began translating that technology, with changes, to humans. That was way back in 2005.

John Malone and Orthobiologics

I first met with John Malone a bit less than a decade ago and learned of his interest in medicine. John is a billionaire philanthropist who had already donated chairs and buildings in bioengineering and personalized medicine to Yale and Johns Hopkins. I worked with John on helping Regenexx get its start and on funding the Interventional Orthopedics Foundation (IOF). Eventually, John decided to donate the key funding for the TMI at CSU.

Wayne McIlwriath and Stem Cells

Wayne is a veterinarian orthopedic surgeon at CSU and one of the fathers of orthopedic stem cell therapy. He is also the father of arthroscopic surgery and has published extensively in both areas. Wayne has been a mentor of mine for years and is now on the board of IOF.

Havemeyer Symposium

This is a closed meeting of many orthobiologic leaders such as Wayne, Jason Dragoo from Stanford, Ashlee Watts from Texas A&M, Brian Cole from Rush, Christian Latterman from Harvard, Ted Schlegel from CU, Brain Johnstone form OHSU, Frank Barry from NUI Galway, Johnny Huard from University of Texas, Thomas Koch University of Guelph, and Chris Little of the University of Sydney. The goal is to present our research to each other.

The upshot? This should be a great next few days to better understand how to work with other physician and university scientists on how best to improve orthobiologics. Onward and upward!

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile