Body can ‘grow bones to repair injuries’

A team of Irish researchers have made a breakthrough that will allow the body to repair itself by growing its own bones.

The cutting-edge research, which is featured on tonight’s episode of Science Squad on RTÉ One, is expected to transform the treatment for sports stars suffering from complicated bone injuries and could also reduce the number of horses put down due to bone injury.

The team of researchers, led by Professor Fergal O’Brien at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, developed an organic material which harnesses the body’s own regenerative power to repair damaged bones and cartilage.

Science Squad presenter Jonathan McCrea said the bone-growing research is the future for orthopaedic injuries.

“It is really exciting technology that can repair both cartilage and bone. Regenerative medicine is a really hot place in science right now. Fergal O Brien’s work is cutting edge,” he said.

“Essentially, it is fixing broken bone. The wow factor for me is it allows bone to grow back as good as new.”

The collagen-based medical scaffold called TheraColl is set to be used to stimulate bone and surrounding tissue to regenerate following a serious trauma such as a major fracture or the removal of a large tumour.

McCrea said the technology could rule out the need for painful operations involving bone grafts or metal plates in players like Gordon D’Arcy, who is featured in the programme speaking about the 20 screws inserted into his arm after a shattering bone injury.

“(Rugby players) go through a huge amount of impact in their game and in the old days you’d put in these metal plates to repair joints which is a foreign object,” McCrea said.

“The ideal is to allow a human body to grow back the way it was. It’s your own cells and your tissues so it’s not foreign to the body. There is no problem with rejection or infection. It is the way forward.”

Prof O’Brien explained that the material, which looks like a mix between cotton wool and polystyrene, has been developed with organic materials found in the human body to stimulate bone and cartilage growth or regeneration.

He said: “It is the culmination of a decade’s work. What we have developed is a bio-material that can go into the body to try and regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues.”

Prof O’Brien said he is hoping the material will be helping to regenerate bone in its first human patients in the coming months. “We’re hoping to have the bone-grafting technology in patients in the next year, by early 2014, and the cartilage repair technology we would hope to follow a year later.

“We hope it will delay the need for hip replacements and knee replacements. We’re working with some orthopaedic surgeons to make sure the material can be delivered in as non-invasive way as possible through arthroscopic keyhole surgery.”

“At the moment, what typically happens with people who have massive voids or defects in their bones is the surgeons go in and they initially take bone from the person themselves from a donor site usually on the hip where they have got some spare bone. “Straight away that is another operative procedure and it means it costs more money and most people who have had a bone graft would say it is very painful.

“We’re trying to cut down the operative procedure to one rather than two. The material is designed in such a way that it recruits its own cells particularly the body’s own stem cells and the material automatically provides the cues to the stem cells to form bone.”

*Science Squad will be broadcast by RTÉ One at 7.30pm this evening.