This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on ISI (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Facial Plastic Surgery  • Biomaterials and Implants  • Rheumatology, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic

M. J. Friedrich

JAMA. 2004;291:2685-2688.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Boston—Called on to withstand a lifetime of physical stress, joints often break down. All too frequently, articular cartilage is damaged or wears away, particularly in such weight-bearing joints as the knees and hips.

New approaches to repair diseased or damaged joints are beginning to emerge from tissue engineering, a field populated by an interdisciplinary network of scientists, physicians, and engineers who are developing techniques for producing new and healthy cartilage, bone, and other tissues for the purpose of restoring diseased or damaged tissue. This research is not only improving understanding of how cartilage functions, said researchers at the Knowledge Foundation's Fourth International Conference on Tissue Engineering for Bone and Cartilage held here in April, it is also yielding new strategies to prevent, delay, and reverse cartilage degeneration.

Damaged joints may one day be treated with laboratory-grown cartilage tissue implants. This micrograph shows cartilage tissue (orange) growing . . . [Full Text of this Article]