About 32.5 million people in the United States and 500 million globally suffer from the degenerative joint disease known as osteoarthritis (OA), according to the Centers for Disease Control.
OA, in which tissues in the joint break down over time, is the most common type of arthritis—especially in older people. The usual treatments target pain-relief, often with prescription opioids or prosthetic surgery, such as knee and hip replacements.
Now, backed by an award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a research team led by Case Western Reserve University will begin work on engineering, growing and commercializing “live” replacement joints to treat this painfully debilitating disease. The award is part of ARPA-H’s Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO) program.