If you need a new knee, look no further than the end of your nose. It turns out that nasal cartilage is a good substitute for the knee’s natural shock-absorbing tissue – so much so that nine people have undergone the first nose-to-knee cartilage transplant.
Unlike many tissues in the body, cartilage, which covers and cushions the surface of joints, has little capacity to regenerate once damaged. Sports injuries or falls can lead to loss of cartilage, but it also degenerates in diseases like osteoarthritis. Treatment options are limited and people often need to have the entire joint replaced with an artificial one.
Now, Ivan Martin, a tissue engineer at University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, has come up with an alternative source of the fibrous tissue – with a little help from the nose.
Cartilage cells from the nasal septum (the part of your nose which separates the nostrils) are known to have a great capacity to grow and form new cartilage. What was not clear was whether novel tissue derived from the nose would be compatible with a joint in another part of the body.
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The cartilage not only settled comfortably into its new home, but also restored the knee joints to good health. It even started to look like knee tissue genetically. After bedding down, the cartilage cells began expressing the genes that you would expect to see in native knee cartilage.
Read the full, original story: Wrecked knees? Nose cartilage can fix them
