Turn your body into a cartilage factory

February 24, 2014

(Wired) – Using scaffolds outside of the body to generate synthetic tracheas, cell-grown blood vessels and ears (kind of) is already an established practice in bioengineering research. But what happens once those scaffolds have been implanted? A team from Duke University is working on getting them to become fuel-generating systems that continually encourage stem cells to grow inside the body, to directly rebuild cartilage on site.