Osteoarthritis, a painful degenerative disease that affects 32.5 million Americans, slowly degrades buffering cartilage until joints grind together bone-on-bone. With no existing effective regenerative therapy, treatments are limited to anti-inflammatory injections and, ultimately, expensive joint replacement surgery.
“It’s a huge problem,” says Karin Payne, PhD, associate professor of orthopedics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine (SOM). “With the aging population, those numbers are expected to increase significantly in the next 20 years. In terms of economic burden, the latest statistics are around $136 billion per year.”
On this episode of Health Science Radio, Payne talks about a multidisciplinary team of medical scientists and providers, engineers and veterinarians in Colorado that is on the forefront of developing a minimally invasive therapy that regenerates cartilage and bone cells – essentially allowing a joint to heal itself.
This possibility may seem farfetched, but through an award of up to $39 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the goal is to develop a commercially viable therapy within five years.
The Colorado team includes co-Principal Investigators Payne; Michael Zuscik, PhD, professor and research vice chair in the Department of Orthopedics at the CU SOM; project leader and Principal Investigator Stephanie Bryant, PhD, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder; and co-Principal Investigator Laurie Goodrich, DVM, PhD, a veterinary clinician scientist and director of the Orthopaedic Research Center at Colorado State University’s Translational Medicine Institute.
CU Anschutz funding commitments underpinned the campus’s long-running osteoarthritis research, including significant support from the School of Medicine and Department of Orthopedics, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Gates Institute.
Payne underscores the Colorado-born collaborative, multi-institutional effort, saying on the podcast, “We kind of pulled all our best ideas together to tackle this grand challenge of developing a regenerative medicine for osteoarthritis.”
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