Organic Spinal Discs Tackle Chronic Back Pain Issues

 

For Dr. Roger Hartl, a neurosurgeon at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, discectomy surgery is a routine procedure. 

 

For his patients, it's usually the last resort to relieve the pain caused by a herniated disc, a common cause of back pain for millions of people around the world.              

 

Hartl is part of team of researchers at Cornell University who have developed an organic spinal disc with tissue harvested from sheep spines. 

 

In experiments with laboratory rats, they've demonstrated that the bioengineered discs can replace diseased or damaged discs with greater efficacy and a longer life-span than artificial ones.     

         

[Dr. Roger Hartl, Professor of Neurosurgery, Weill Cornell Medical College]:

"What we are doing right now is removing the disc that is pushing on the spinal chord. So when we do that we end up with a gap between the bones where disc is usually situated. With the biological disc implant that we're working on. The treatment here would be to have a grown disc and implant that disc into the defect that we're creating to replace the disc that we're removing."  

            

Conventional implants used in the procedure are made of metal and plastic and can cause patients to lose some degree of mobility. 

 

They often deteriorate over time.

 

[Dr. Roger Hartl, Professor of Neurosurgery, Weill Cornell Medical College]:  

"The options that we have right now available other than a simple discectomy are implants that eventually lead to a fusion and the biological disc solution that we are working on really avoids that. It's really an implant that we insert into the spine, that replicates exactly the function of the normal spinal disc..."

             

The new discs are made of two polymers with an alginate in the center.  

 

The alginate is surrounded by a firmer and more stable ring of collagen that wraps around the outside of the disc to keep it weighted, like real spinal discs. 

             

Dr. Lawrence Banassar grew the biological discs in a Cornell University lab.  

 

He and his team conducted tests by inserting them into the spines of rats whose discs had been removed.  

 

Studies showed that the animals grew new cells that integrated into the spine.  

            

But would the complicated structures survive with their lack of blood vessels and ability to take in oxygen?

 

[Dr. Roger Hartl, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Weill Cornell Medical College]:  

"It was very unclear when we started doing this research how this would pan out in an experimental setting with a bioengineered disc. Would that lead to faster degradation and death of those discs or would those discs actually be able to survive and proliferate? And they actually did. That's the biggest accomplishent of our research so far is that we were able to create an organ that is essentially devoid of any blood vessels, that is relatively large, but that survives and actually improves and gets better over time."   

           

The scientists say their findings offer hope to patients that a natural implant could be available for those suffering from spinal injury or herniated discs a few years time.