Some people with damaged cartilage in their knees would often rather live with the pain than endure a major knee replacement surgery. But researchers in the U. Kansas School of Engineering have found an alternative to surgery that doesn’t involve taking the knee apart and produces a more natural transition from bone to cartilage.

Michael Detamore, associate professor of engineering, said many people chose not to have knee replacement surgery because they couldn’t afford it or were afraid of it.

“They chop off the ends of the bones and cartilage and put these plastic and metal pieces into your knee, so it’s a pretty severe type of surgery,” Detamore said.

Detamore and a team of almost 20 post-doctoral, graduate and undergraduate students who work in the Tissue Engineering Lab in Learned Hall have been working on a microspheric scaffold, or a tiny round plug, that carries proteins that promote bone and cartilage regeneration and decomposes inside the body as the tissue heals.

The National Institutes of Health awarded the team a $1.3 million, five-year grant in March for its research.

Detamore said making these scaffolds required a delicate balance of temperature, pressure and concentration to regenerate tissue. He said the researchers wanted to find a way to engineer these gradients to help tissue regenerate.

This meant they needed to find a way to mimic the seamless way healthy bone cartilage transitions into bone instead of using the connecting material used in knee replacements today.

Detamore said the scaffold would be a solution for people with early stage osteoarthritis, cartilage damaged through an injury or a localized area of damaged cartilage. He said surgeons could take out injured tissue and put the scaffold in its place. Surgery to implant a scaffold would be less invasive because the scaffold is only about 4 millimeters in diameter and 5 millimeters long — about the size of a pea — so a patient would need only a few days to recover.

“That’s another real advantage,” Detamore said. “You go in with a scope and just have a few stitches, and you’re back on your feet in a short amount of time.”

One of the problems with knee replacement surgery, Detamore said, is that the prosthetic used today prevents cartilage from mixing with bone, which is not how the knee joint works naturally. The scaffold created in Detamore’s lab mimics the healthy tissue because its properties allow bone and cartilage to mix.

Detamore said there were ways to transport these cartilage tissue cells that were currently on the market, but nothing was similar to what his team is working on.

“There’s nothing like this where you have a porous, biodegradable material that’s simultaneously going to promote both bone and cartilage regeneration,” Detamore said.

Nathan Dormer, a doctoral student from Topeka, has worked in the Tissue Engineering Lab for three years. He said the team’s research on cartilage regeneration was important to him because he has family members with arthritis.

“People you know could benefit from this,” Dormer said. “It could affect your future.”

The team is working with the Institute for Advancing Medical Innovation, a campus organization that helps to take research to the commercial market. If the IAMI can find investors for the Tissue Engineering lab, the scaffold could be ready for clinical testing in five years.

In the meantime, the researchers run several types of tests on the scaffold, including in vitro testing using stem cells. The stem cells typically are cord tissue cells from donated umbilical cords, which come from Lawrence Memorial Hospital, or bone marrow from rats, rabbits or purchased human cells.

Detamore said the researchers published their first paper on umbilical cord cells in musculoskeletal engineering in 2007 although their use in this kind of bioengineering is still relatively new.

“It’s something that’s really taking off now, and it’s good to be at the forefront of that,” Detamore said. “It’s exciting.”