Home › Blog › Our Newest Research: Knee ACL Stem Cell Injections

There are so many clinics these past several years that have popped up after the physician took a weekend course and became a self-proclaimed stem cell expert. Being the first clinic in the U.S. to treat orthopedic patients with advanced stem cells, we’ve been able to lead that growing pack by innovating and perfecting what we do. Part of that process is publishing the research that everyone else can then try to emulate. Case in point this morning is our new knee ACL stem cell paper.

Let’s face it, knee ACL surgery is a scarred orthopedic surgery procedure that has really come to define modern orthopedic sports medicine. Not a week goes by without some high level professional athlete somewhere tearing an ACL and the sports media announcing that he or she needs surgery to “fix” the problem. However, what if most of the time the athlete didn’t need the surgery? What if the athlete could keep their natural ligament and avoid all of the major downtime and side effects of ripping out their natural ligament and trying to reconstruct an artificial one that will never be quite as good as the old one?

Our knee ACL stem cell research paper looks at the first 10 patients we ever treated. This was back when we thought that all we could treat was partially torn ligaments and as we were slowly learning that bigger complete tears could be treated as well. We’ve since treated many more patients that will be the subject of another upcoming paper. This study looked at before and after images using computerized imaging analysis to objectify if the post injection MRI looked better than the pre-procedure image.  We were able to objectively show evidence of healing in the vast majority of ligaments treated, all without surgery, but just an ultra-precise injection of the patient’s busted up ACL ligament with our unique protocol of same day stem cells.

The upshot? Based on what we routinely see everyday, we believe that about 70% of existing orthopedic surgery to reconstruct a torn ACL ligament will go away over the next 20 years. We also believe that the ability to get maximum healing with stem cell injections is directly tied to the precise image guided techniques we’ve perfected over the last several years with our Regenexx stem cell procedure for partial acl tears and full non-retracted tears. Now it’s time to continue to publish to continue to prove what we see in practice everyday, which is how we plan to change the world, one torn ACL at a time!

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