Duke's cartilage-weaving machine

Researchers at Duke University are reporting in the Feb. issue of Nature Materials that they have created a machine that can weave new cartilage. It's shown here layering fabric, but the idea is that doctors would feed your stem cells into the device and it would whip up some fresh connective goo to, say, keep your hip working.

In laboratory tests, the fabric scaffold that the researchers have created had the same mechanical properties as native cartilage. In the near future, surgeons will be able to impregnate custom-designed scaffolds with cartilage-forming stem cells and chemicals that stimulate their growth and then implant them into patients during a single procedure, the researchers said.
"By taking a synthetic material that already has the properties of cartilage and combining it with living cells, we can build a human tissue that can be integrated rapidly into the body, representing a new approach in the field of tissue engineering," Moutos said.

The secret? It's all in the weave.

"Most machines that produce fabrics weave one set of fibers that are oriented perpendicularly to another set of fibers. However, the machine that Moutos developed adds a third set of fibers, which creates a three-dimensional product. Also, since the scaffold is a woven material, there are tiny spaces where cartilage cells can nestle and grow."

From medGadget