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Knee Arthritis Stem Cell Clinical Data Paper…What Works and What Doesn’t?

We have a great team assembled now to take the massive amounts of data being collected by our one of a kind stem cell treatment registry and morph that it into peer reviewed publications. This paper is the world’s largest clinical experience with same day stem cell procedures and knee arthritis. It follows about 800% more patients than the nearest publication.

In this new paper, we compared two different Regenexx stem cell protocols for treating knee arthritis. One group was treated with our first generation Regenexx-SD Knee procedure (616 procedures) and the second was the Regenexx-AD Knee procedure (224 procedures) where we added the stem cells from a fat graft. We looked at these two data sets in our registry because there had been much buzz about how adding in a fat graft or fat stem cells to bone marrow was the best thing since sliced bread.

What were the results? Both procedures performed well in terms of pain relief, function, and % improvement. There was no statistical difference between the two, so the theory that adding in fat magically makes bone marrow stem cells better didn’t hold water. Why? As I’ve blogged many times before, fat stem cells have been found to be inferior to bone marrow for orthopedic applications in many different papers.

The other side of this paper that’s important is that we also report on complications. For knee arthritis, this is also now the world’s largest safety paper for stem cells from bone marrow. The procedures turned out to be no more risky than any other common injection and certainly much safer than the knee replacement procedures they helped many patents avoid.

The upshot? We now have about 5-6 more papers like this in various stages of the publication process. Unlike many providers who use stem cells, we are 100% committed to the very expensive and time consuming process of getting our data published. Not just the superstar patients, but the results of everyone for whom we have data that has received the treatment. We first do that on-line about once a year and then take from that what’s worthy of publication and submit that to the peer review process. I should also note that these results are very specific to our proprietary process which is quite different than other bone marrow procedures being performed using bedside machines. So while they do apply to our Regenexx Network Providers (there were 17 clinics represented here including our own), they don’t apply to any other clinic claiming to perform a stem cell procedure.

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile