A Louisville company is studying whether cells taken from patients’ fat could reduce knee pain and improve motion in people with arthritis.of a process that extracts fat from the patient, uses a chemical reaction to isolate cells believed to have regenerative properties and injects them into the patient’s knee.
The trial isn’t enrolling patients in Colorado, but if the process gets FDA approval, doctors offices could easily adopt it here and around the country, said William Cimino, CEO of GID BIO. Studying cell-based therapies in arthritis is difficult because people tend to report significant relief from placebos, creating a challenge in sorting out whether they experienced relief from the treatment because they thought they would, said Dr. Cato Laurencin, CEO of the Cato T. Laurencin Institute at the University of Connecticut, who studies fat-derived therapies but isn’t affiliated with the GID BIO trial.
Patients wouldn’t see any difference in images of their knees after the injections, but have reported reduced pain and better functioning in the smaller studies before the current trial, Cimino said.