So you can recover the movement in your knees

• April 24, 2024

The meniscus allow us to have an adequate knee function, cushion all our weight when walking or climbing stairs, as well as allowing us to have stability. However, there are several factors that can damage them, such as: overweight and the obesity , excess exercise or age.

At Center for Applied Physics and Advanced Technology (CFATA) of the UNAM, Dr. Miriam Rocío Estévez González and her colleagues develop a polymer-based biomaterial that replaces or regenerates our meniscus.

The biomaterials they are materials designed to act as biological systems, whose purpose is to treat, increase, replace or regenerate some tissue, organ or function of the body. Their main characteristic is that they are in direct contact with the human being, in order to Improve your quality of life.

The first step…

One of the first advances of the researcher was to make fibers that were deposited in a mold made especially to try to match the meniscus. To achieve this, mixtures of different polymers were used, in order to find the shape and arrangements similar to this fundamental part of our knees.

So far, they have already tests of the material in laboratory animals to observe how it is that the arrangement of fibers obtained allowed or not vascularization and what they observed is that began to grow tissue , there was no type of rejection, and even, they noticed that there was cellular growth on the material.

Dr. Estévez and her team are working on prototypes of meniscus substitutes or regenerators thereof, tailored to each patient.

The tests of this material that regenerates the menisci is still underway and the next step for the researchers of the UNAM will be to carry out studies on patients from different medical institutions.

Video Medicine: Johns Hopkins All Children’s Sports Medicine - Knee Cap Dislocation (April 2024).