Thanks for the interest Maria!
I'm still fighting both knee and spine problems, but am doing okay with pain control. Physical activity is limited to swimming, yoga, and stationary cycling, however, I continue to hope for improvement in the future.
Chondrocyte transplantation is a fairly old technique and has been used to repair large, chondral lesion in the knee for the past 15 years or so. Chondrocytes are the living cells that produce both collagen and proteoglycan in cartilage and other connective tissue. Cartilage is mostly "dead" tissue (matrix) with only a few chondrocytes per unit volume producing more tissue. Some of us (luck
) folks don't seem to have very many chondrocytes in our cartilage and discs, so, we experience premature degeneration
.
Lucky for us, chondrocytes are very portable. You can harvest them from someplace you don't need them, expand them in a lab (at great expense), then re-implant them somewhere you do need them. Like I mentioned before, this technique has been in use for repairing knee chondral lesions for at least a decade. For spinal discs, you can use add chondrocytes to the nucleus of a dehydrated disc to rehydrate it. The transplanted chondrocytes produce proteoglycans, which hold lots of water, and keep the nucleus from shrinking.
Dr. Bertagnoli has been using the technique for quite some time to restore nucleus material lost during discectomy. When someone has a disc herniation, the herniated fragment is used for cell culturing. In my case, I needed an ADR at c6/c7. This means I had an entire cervical nucleus available for culturing. That nucleus is now sitting, frozen at Codon in Berlin waiting for us to tell them to start the culturing process. If my cells grow (80% chance or so), then Dr. Bertagnoli can simply inject them into my dehydrated L4/L5. If they do their job, then I might buy years of extra life on L4/L5 before I would need ADR.
In my opinion, these celll transplant techniques fall under the "can't lose" category. Other than cost, they have very little risk and enormous potential for delaying the degenerative process.
Fun, eh?
Best to all!
Laura