Cartilage Repair: What's the Right Combination?

START-UP counts some 40 commercial development efforts in cartilage repair and regeneration. Some are implanting synthetic scaffolds, and some are offering cell-based therapies used with or without scaffolds. It's a crowded and confusing category. So many companies are chasing a market that is still somewhat undefined and doesn't seem large enough to support them all. What's clear, however, is that almost 15 years after the introduction of Carticel, the first cell-based implant for cartilage repari, there is still an unsatisified market of patients aged 20-60 with knee pain due to cartilage damage or degeneration.