A Living Knee Implant Designed to Regrow Cartilage
Columbia researchers are developing NOVAKnee, a living knee implant: a 3D-printed scaffold seeded with cells that is meant to regrow cartilage and bone.
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columbia.edu
A Living Knee Implant Designed to Regrow Cartilage
Researchers at Columbia University are developing NOVAKnee, a living knee implant. It has the same shape and surgical approach as today's metal-and-plastic knee replacements, yet it is built to be replaced over time by the body's own tissue. The university's news feature calls it "a living, 3D-printed human organ." The work is led by biomedical engineers Nadeen Chahine, of Orthopedic Surgery, and Clark Hung, of Biomedical Engineering. It is funded by ARPA-H, a US federal health research agency, through its NITRO program, short for Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis.
The Problem It Targets
Hung describes the trade-off behind current knee replacement: "Right now, you want to perform the surgery when you think the implant will outlive the patient." That timing leaves many people waiting. He says patients "want to play with their kids now, pain-free." Chahine explains why cartilage is hard to match, saying "no other material has the same joint lubrication or load-bearing properties of articular cartilage." Articular cartilage is the smooth tissue that lines the ends of the bones in a joint. The feature calls regenerating musculoskeletal tissue "the holy grail of orthopedic medicine."
How the Implant Is Built
The core of NOVAKnee is a biodegradable scaffold made by 3D printing and seeded with cartilage and bone cells. Those cells come from one of two sources: the patient's own abdominal fat, collected as lipoaspirate, or adult induced pluripotent stem cells, which are adult cells reprogrammed so they can become many cell types. The scaffold must bear load on the day of surgery and then break down. As it disappears, the cells are meant to produce natural cartilage and bone that join the patient's existing bone. Each implant is sized to the individual knee.
The Team and the Stage
Other Columbia contributors named on the page are Alice Huang, Chang Lee, Treena Arinzeh, Gerard Ateshian and Roshan Shah. James L. Cook, of the University of Missouri, will lead the preclinical studies. ARPA-H announced on the same day as the feature that the team met all its milestones to enter the preclinical phase, the first NITRO total joint team to do so. A separate company, NOVAJoint Orthopedics, has been set up to bring the implant to patients, and manufacturing is moving from Columbia's labs to industry partners.
What Comes Next
The team reports a successful pre-IND step, an early meeting stage with the FDA before a trial application, and continues to work with the agency through NOVAJoint Orthopedics. No human trials have started. The first are projected to begin in 2028 if the preclinical goals are met. The feature calls the project a high-risk, high-reward "moonshot," and it presents a lifelong implant as the goal, not a result already shown. It shares no preclinical data.
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