Home › Blog › Meet our New Cell Sorter and Expanded Regenexx Research and Education for 2015!

2015 will bring many exciting changes and improvements to what we do at Regenexx. One of the more interesting additions will be the Regenexx Foundation, a non-profit research and education focused entity. In addition, we will continue to expand our Colorado research lab. As part of that expansion-meet our new cell sorter!

FACS or Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorting is a technology that can identify markers on the surface of cells and sort them by type. What’s amazing is that despite there being at least millions to billions of cells in any given sample, this little machine can sort 30,000 cells a second! So for example, if you have 3 million stem cells that you want to separate out from a mix of other cells (for research purposes), you can do that in a few minutes!

This little cell sorter will be added to our university style stem cell lab in Colorado which currently has more technology aimed at improving the quality of the cell therapy than any other medical practice and physician network in the U.S. We can use FACS to sort cells, flow cytometry to identify them, PCR to look at their genes, ELISA to measure the proteins they produce, and Flourscent Microscopy to see where certain proteins are being produced inside.

Our expanded research and education efforts for 2015 will also include the Regenexx Foundation. This non-profit will focus on research and education efforts like continual improvement of our clinical data collection and publication through the Regenexx Registry, the establishment of an annual stem cell conference in orthopedics, the expansion of our Interventional Orthopedics fellowship to train young physicians, the establishment of treatment scholarships for patients who can’t otherwise afford cell therapies, and various large lab projects. The main focus will be promoting the concept that the future of orthopedics will be focused less on surgery and more on the injection of cells.

The upshot? Why aren’t other physicians reinvesting in research at this same level? Your guess is as good as mine. What I do know is that there ‘s much to learn about improving outcomes for orthopedic cell therapies and we’re well on our way to assembling a world class team of physicians, statisticians, and lab scientists to make a difference!

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