Medical background
Today's gold standard therapy
ACL injuries mostly happen during skiing, soccer or other sport disciplines with rotational movements, predominantly in the younger adult population aged between 20 and 30. In the case of ACL rupture, intrinsic cure is not possible and therefore surgical treatment is required.
Today's gold standard therapy is the autologous transplantation of tissue taken from the patient’s own patellar ligament or tendon of the semitendinosus muscle.
However, this procedure requires an additional surgical step including the extraction and the ex-vivo
preparation of the material. This treatment cannot be repeated too often since the quantity of autologous materials is limited. Moreover, the harvesting of autologous materials leads to partial destabilization in these anatomic areas and includes an infection risk.
Conservative treatment (no surgery, only physiotherapy) is only indicated when a patient´s lifestyle is not influenced by instability of the knee and mostly leads to destabilization and increased likelihood of arthritis.
Novel and proprietary silk technology for human medical use
In a study by Rathbone et al. (Stem Cells Int. 2012), 300 knee surgeons were interviewed in the UK to determine whether they would use a regenerative cruciate ligament implant and how an optimal implant would ideally look like. In the study it became very clear that the ideal ACL graft would be a tissue engineering (tissue regeneration) cruciate ligament with the following properties:- Simple one-step surgical procedure
- Scaffold for generating an endogenous cruciate ligament
- Immediate mechanical load-bearing capacity
- Slow biodegradation of the scaffold
MorphoMed's solution: RegACL will be the first ACL implant fulfilling all these requirements.
