Healing Bone with Stem Cells

As we have known that patients with severe fractures can't be healed on their own typically undergo a painful bone biopsy in which a bone fragment is removed from the hip and then transplanted onto the site of the wound. But now we have improvements to an alternative procedure developed could soon make this process obsolete. In the procedure, orthopedic surgeons withdraw bone marrow from the patient and then process and transplant those cells onto the fracture without the need for bone biopsy. Implantable materials that grab stem cells and spur their growth and survival could improve bone-healing surgeries. Linda Griffith and her colleagues at MIT have created a new tissue-engineering material that could help cells survive the harsh transplant environment which is a key step in cell-transplant therapies. Although they are still working on this to be able to extract bone marrow from a patient and, while still in the operating room, filter the extract through a specially designed scaffold that preferentially grabs bone-forming stem cells and boosts their growth and survival. And then the cells can then be directly implanted into the patient. We all hope with this method can help many patients with severe fractures.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18274/