Watching TED talks on iTunes - or an iPad for that matter - is the futurist's equivalent of a basketball fan's immersion into March Madness. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design is a non-profit organization devoted to spreading forward-thinking ideas via web lectures from today's most distinguished scientists, thinkers and polymaths.
While the famous TED lectures or "talks" are manna from heaven for digerati, environmentalists or merely curious souls, most of the topics typically deal with mapping the universe, new media paradigms or sleek new energy alternatives.
How happy were we to see orthopedics get its day (OK, 10 minutes) in the sun last week when TED published a lecture by Dr. Kevin Stone on the future of joint replacement.
Filmed last February, Dr. Stone's talk starts out with the unsettling statistic that anyone with an average lifespan in the US has a 50% chance of developing arthritis from aging or common injuries. Despite the advances in joint replacement made over the last several decades, these are essentially engineering developments that have a finite life or other limitations.
The solution? Biologics.
Dr. Stone then goes on to highlight the substantial potentialities of biologics and the range of materials available to advance clinical care. One notable potential is stem cell paste grafting for damaged knee cartilage. In the talk, Dr. Stone also highlights growth limiters such as cost and the constrained supply of young, healthy allograft tissues. One way around the supply question is to use animal tissues so long as we can bypass the immunology barriers. Promising examples include Regeneration Biologics' collagen meniscus implant (now called Menaflex) which is derived from pulverized bovine tendon or intact porcine ligaments that have been treated to prevent tissue rejection by humans. The end game - call it Super Biologics - is to harness 400 million years of evolutionary biology and make it work for us.
Dr. Stone's TED talk can be viewed by clicking here or by copying the link at the bottom of this blog into your browser.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_stone_the_bio_future_of_joint_replacement.html
