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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Working on a biological solution for knee replacement surgery
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2015-12-08 18:00:00
	Description:		Osteoarthritis is the aging and wearing of cartilage in the joints of your hands, knees, hips and spine. If severe enough in the knee, it may even require replacement surgery. While current techniques typically use metal or plastic replacement joints, Dr. Grace O’Connell’s biomechanics lab at the University of California, Berkeley is growing cartilage tissue in hopes of developing a biological solution. "We’ve been able to grow very small discs of cartilage, about four millimeters in diameter. But your knee is a lot bigger than that. So if you want something that’s clinically relevant, at the minimum, you want something that’s about an inch in diameter. And so we’ve developed a way of growing smaller pieces and then, in a sense gluing them together with native matrix to make a larger surface." O’Connell says that being able to engineer larger cartilage tissue holds promise for future clinical application. "Instead of replacing the entire knee joint with metal and plastic components, you could then replace just the damaged cartilage with a biological replace strategy."
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