AZAALAS Fall Webinar: Musculoskeletal Tissue Regeneration Using Scaffolds and Adult Stem Cells

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 30 million Americans have osteoarthritis — the type of arthritis caused by damage or breakdown of joint cartilage on the surface of bones — making it both the most common form of arthritis and the most common cause of disability in adults. Approximately 6.3 million fractures occur each year in the United States, costing the health-care system approximately $28 million per year. During the lecture, Dr. John Szivek, Director of the Robert G. Volz, MD, Orthopedic Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona, will share recent results from their work to provide a scaffold support structure that is anchored in bone and on which high-quality cartilage can be grown. For people who have osteoarthritis, there are no injectable therapies that will regenerate cartilage now or in the near future. The best hope for these patients is a scaffold-based system on which cartilage is grown. Special attention will be spent on his preclinical biomedical studies and their importance on his research.