At Procelsio Clinic, preserving a damaged joint is always our top priority. Various factors, including trauma, can lead to isolated and deep cartilage damage—particularly in the knee and hip joints. If not treated early, continued stress can result in osteoarthritis of the joint.
In the past, these defects were treated using a technique called microfracture (drilling into the bone), which typically led to the formation of unstable replacement tissue. Today, the standard treatment is the transplantation of autologous cartilage cells, grown in the lab and used to fill the defect. This tissue is comparable in quality and durability to healthy cartilage. In the knee joint, the method has been successfully used for almost 20 years with consistently good to excellent results.
At the hip joint, this technique was first successfully implemented by Procelsio Clinic and is still performed by only a few highly specialized centers worldwide.
The primary indication is cartilage damage in the hip joint, which can result from trauma, overuse, or femoroacetabular impingement (FAI). In these cases, it is not only important to determine if and how the cartilage damage should be treated, but above all, to identify and address its underlying causes.
Such conditions often involve complex interrelationships and should be treated by highly experienced orthopedic surgeons. All necessary expertise and infrastructure are available at Procelsio Clinic. Our specialized medical team is happy to advise you and will support you throughout the entire course of treatment.
In the first step, we arthroscopically harvest a small amount of healthy cartilage cells from your joint, along with a blood sample from a vein. These cells are cultivated in a specialized laboratory using your own blood. The process is entirely biological and free of any additives.We simply support your body’s own cells in multiplying under ideal, controlled conditions—greatly enhancing the procedure’s compatibility and effectiveness.
The resulting cells are processed into small spheres, known as “spheroids,” each containing up to 200,000 hyaline cartilage cells. After a cultivation period of six to eight weeks, the spheroids are arthroscopically transplanted back into the joint. Following another six weeks of rehabilitation, the defect is typically filled enough to allow for increased joint loading.After about 6 to 8 months, the newly formed cartilage is generally nearly as resilient as the original tissue.
