Background

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a type of joint disease that results from the breakdown of joint cartilage and underlying bone. The main symptoms of OA are pain, stiffness and loss of function in the affected joint which all develop over time. Within the UK, OA is the most common type of arthritis and is thought to affect a third of people aged 45 or over (8.75 million people). In the US osteoarthritis affects approximately 27 million. The most common kind is knee OA. The odds of developing knee arthritis are seven times higher in overweight/obese persons than in people of normal weight.

Current treatments for OA are symptomatic therapies that aim to provide pain relief and improve function as well as offer a disease-modifying effect; however, available treatment modalities have limited therapeutic effect, and more than half of OA patients are unable to achieve adequate pain relief with any of the current treatments and will remain with chronic pain until ultimately the whole joint is replaced.

Technology Overview

The team at the University have developed a series of in vitro aged mesenchymal stem cells, and have demonstrated that these cells have the capacity to drive healing and this is maintained through multiple passages/population doublings. The researchers have characterised these same cells for their capacity to differentiate and shown that in vitro ageing leads to a sharp decline in both cartilage formation and bone formation, indicating that promotion of tissue healing is a quite separate process from differentiation and tissue formation.

Applications

Therefore, these in vitro aged MSCs show great potential for use in a range of therapies for OA, including injectable cells. This would allow treatment of many thousands of patients from a single donation of bone marrow.

Opportunity

The University are seeking a commercial partner to help develop the technology and bring it to market.

The Use of in vitro Aged Undifferentiated Mesenchymal Stem Cells to Drive Healing of Tissue Damage

Patents

IP Status