A Bedside-to-Bench-to-Bedside Journey to Advance Osteochondral Allograft Transplantation towards Biologic Joint...

More than 70 million adults in the United States are impacted by osteoarthritis (OA). Symptomatic articular cartilage loss that progresses to debilitating OA is being diagnosed more frequently and earlier in life, such that a growing number of active patients are faced with life-altering health care decisions at increasingly younger ages. Joint replacement surgeries, in the form of various artificial arthroplasties, are reliable operations, especially for older (≥65 years), more sedentary patients with end-stage OA, but have major limitations for younger, more active patients. For younger adults and those who wish to remain highly active, artificial arthroplasties are associated with significantly higher levels of pain, complications, morbidity, dysfunction, and likelihood of revision. Unfortunately, non-surgical management strategies and surgical treatment options other than joint replacement are often not indicated and have not proven to be consistently successful for this large and growing population of patients. As such, these patients are often relegated to postpone surgery, take medications including opioids, profoundly alter their lifestyle, and live with pain and disability until artificial arthroplasty is more likely to meet their functional demands without high risk for early revision. As such, our research team set out to develop, test, and validate biologic joint restoration strategies that could provide consistently successful options for young and active patients with joint disorders who were not considered ideal candidates for artificial arthroplasty. In pursuit of this goal, we implemented a targeted bedside-to-bench-to-bedside translational approach to hypothesis-driven studies designed to address this major unmet need in orthopaedics by identifying and overcoming key clinical limitations and obstacles faced by health care teams and patients in realizing optimal outcomes after biologic joint restoration. The objective of this article is to condense more than two decades of rigorous patient-centered research aimed at optimizing osteochondral and meniscus allograft transplantation toward more consistently successful management of complex joint problems in young and active patients.