Zimmer, ISTO Advance Engineered Juvenile Cartilage Studies (Lauren Uzdienski @ HealthPointCapital)
Zimmer and ISTO Technologies provided an update yesterday on their research program on engineered juvenile cartilage for the repair of damaged knees. The company plans to enroll up to 225 patients at 25 sites in a new phase III study, which will compare the use of the DeNovo ET Engineered Tissue Graft to microfracture for the repair of cartilage defects in the knee.
Cartilage repair is the holy grail of sports medicine, and we’ve been following Zimmer and ISTO’s progress in this field since they first received an IND for the device in 2006. As the company advances its pre-market research, it appears that early results for the DeNovo ET Engineered Tissue Graft, which consists of living, scaffold-free engineered juvenile cartilage cells, are promising. In yesterday’s press release, Zimmer says that preclinical studies, cartilage cells derived from juvenile tissue “demonstrated a significantly greater capacity for regenerating cartilage compared to cells derived from adult cartilage.”