Key Engineering Materials Vol. 541

Abstract: The most advanced options nowadays available in joint arthroplasty rely on the application to diseased joints of human-made bearing surfaces consisting of microstructurally engineered polyethylene and ceramics as substitutes for the damaged joint cartilage and, partly, for bone. However, it is progressively becoming clear that, whatever superior the biomaterial designed for this purpose, owing to the quite severe structural requirements for human joints, including high contact stresses and aggressive environment at the load-bearing surface, it will have a necessarily limited service lifetime. Giving a quite critical but fundamentally true statement, one could say that, so far, no single product has yet been capable to meet all such severe requirements. Moreover, it is not clear if such a perfect biomaterial will ever exist. This is the main reason for pursuing repair (rather than replacement) of damaged cartilage. In this paper, we inquire about the present status and expected progress in healing osteoarthritis (OA) of chronically damaged joints, and surmise that such innovative procedures could sometime, in the near future, replace the current joint arthroplasty procedures, thus avoiding the unavoidably intrusive surgery associated with nowadays total joint replacements. After reviewing the state of art in the new field of joint cartilage healing, we shall stress the potential importance of vibrational spectroscopy both in diagnostics and in accelerating discoveries through the future developments of therapeutic approaches to cartilage diseases.