PEOPLE’s jaws have been repaired using bone grown from their own stem cells,
in the first clinical trial of the technique.
Surgeons normally plug gaps in bones with artificial implants or chips of
bone taken from the patient’s pelvis. But the operation often leaves people with
persistent pelvic pain.
A better way is to grow new bone from an individual’s own cells, says Clemens
van Blitterswijk of IsoTis in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. His group makes
millimetre-sized granules of porous hydroxyapatite—the mineral part of
bone—filled with bone stem cells taken from the patient’s bone marrow.
“You can extract the cells easily from the pelvis under…
