Fat Stem Cells Knee Injections: Getting Fat Stem Cells to Repair Cartilage is Still a Problem

As I have blogged many times, adipose (fat) stem cells don’t like to become cartilage, and fat stem cells knee injections are therefore not very effective.  All stem cells can become other tissue or orchestrate it’s repair. While bone marrow stem cells just need a little nudge to head in the direction of cartilage repair, fat stem cells need a sledgehammer to get there. Case in point is this recent research paper showing that the researchers had to go through great machinations to get fat stem cells to repair cartilage. In this study, the researchers found that stem cells from fat release certain chemicals which can inhibit cartilage formation. Their solution? Use antibodies against the bad chemicals to neutralize them. You might be asking yourself the very obvious question, why not just use bone marrow stem cells to repair cartilage? Your guess is as good as mine…

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