By Amy CorderoyJan. 30, 2014, 3 a.m.

People who need hip replacements could be able to use cells taken during the procedure to help heal their damaged bones, researchers say.

People who need hip replacements could be able to use cells taken during the procedure to help heal their damaged bones, researchers say.

A ground-breaking study has found that parts usually discarded when people with arthritis have hip replacements can actually be used to collect stem cells that could help regrow bone, cartilage and fat.

Tens of thousands of Australians have hip replacements each year, with numbers rising by more than 37 per cent over the past 10 years to more than 36,500 last year.

Melissa Knothe Tate, the Paul Trainor chair of biomedical engineering at the University of NSW, said her team had shown for the first time that the previously discarded tissue has the potential to be put to good use.

"There is a lot of potential for stem cells to be used to harness the body's own healing capacity for all sorts of illnesses," she said. "Arthritis is the leading cause of disability in ageing adults and the increasing number of hip replacements opens up a new, easy way of getting stem cells."

Her international research team collected samples from the periosteum, connective tissue in the ball at the very top of the thigh bone, of four people with arthritis who had hip replacement.

"These patients are aged and they have disease, so this study was quite out of the box," Professor Knothe Tate said.

But on comparing the stem cells they derived with commercial cells taken from bone marrow they found "remarkable similarities". The cells were similar to bone marrow in terms of their ability to develop into other cells in the lab, according to the research published in Stem Cells Translational Medicine. Professor Knothe Tate said patients could potentially bank their cells for future use, to help heal bones seriously damaged by things like car accidents or cancer surgery, by wrapping them in a cover that could deliver the cells to the injured area.

Read more here:
It's good to the bone: hip surgery 'waste' could become healing cells

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