Home › Blog › Even being Placed as a Good Candidate doesn’t Always Guarantee Success

We began the Regenexx Candidate Rating System to give potential patients an idea of the success we predict from our experience that they could expect from a Regenexx Procedure.  RS was a recent Regenexx-SD patient with all the hallmarks of a good candidate for the procedure: limited arthritic disease, no medications, good cell number, and in good physical shape. However, regrettably he had no response from this knee stem cell procedure. The “why” of why he didn’t get a response when many similar patients do well with Regenexx-SD, is why we have a research program. In addition, even a bigger mystery is why some patients with more severe disease outperform RS in their outcomes from the procedure. We cryo-preserve (freeze to -150C) a sample of almost every treated patient’s bone marrow harvest as part of a research database to hopefully answer this question. While we can control certain aspects of disease and lifestyle, we can’t control for other properties of the stem cells (at least not yet). We hope to begin looking at some of these frozen cells later this year so that we can determine if certain characteristics of the patient’s own cells may play a role in why some patients fail to respond to stem cell therapy. The upshot? While we can help many patients with our stem cell procedures, we’re constantly striving to find new and better ways to help more.

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