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Belgian clinic repairs bones with stem cells from fatty tissue (2014-01-16)

Belgian medical researchers have succeeded in repairing bones using stem cells from fatty tissue with a new technique. The team at the Saint Luc university clinic hospital in Brussels have treated 11 patients, eight of them children, with fractures or bone defects that their bodies could not repair.

 


 

Doctors have for years harvested stem cells from bone marrow at the top of the pelvis and injected them back into the body to repair bone.

The ground-breaking technique of Saint Luc's centre for tissue and cellular therapy is to remove a piece of fatty tissue from the patient, a less invasive process than pushing a needle into the pelvis and with a stem cell concentration they say is some 500 times higher.

The stem cells are then isolated and used to grow bone in the laboratory.
The new material in a lab dish resembles more plasticine than bone, but can be moulded to fill a fracture, rather like a dentist's filling in a tooth, hardening in the body.
Some of those treated have included people recovering from tumours that had to be removed from bones. One 13-year-old boy, with a fracture and disorder that rendered him unable to repair bone, could resume sports within 14 months of treatment.

A spin-off founded last year called Novadip Biosciences will seek to commercialise the treatment, initially to allow spinal fusion among elderly people with degenerated discs.

For more information
Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc (UCL)

MDN

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