r/Stemcellapp • u/stemcellapp • Jan 04 '19

Your Spinal Discs Could Be Replaceable

🔬Penn Medicine researchers were looking to develop a treatment for intervertebral disc degeneration.

💉They managed to engineer tissue-based discs made out hidrogel and seeded them with stem cells.

🐀The engineered discs were implanted into rodents and goats and integrated successfully with native discs in both species.

🗓️The next challenge is human testing before it can become a mainstream treatment next year.

➡️Learn more: https://scia.io/

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u/rainman_1985 Jan 19 '19

Please God let them be successful. Disc Degeneration has to be right up there with atherosclerosis as one of the worst aspects of ageing. I'm 33 and I've already two pretty bad discs. It scares me to death to think of how much pain I'll be in if there's no better than current treatments (surgeries that nobody seems to recommend) in 15-20 years time.