Articular Cartilage

For millions of active adults, joint pain arrives earlier than expected—and with no good answers. They are told they’re too young for joint replacement, yet no other treatment offers lasting relief. So, they wait. They hurt. They stop doing the things they love.

This is the reality for people living with osteoarthritis (OA), which now affects more than 595 million people—a number that has more than doubled since 1990, making it the leading cause of disability worldwide. Careers are cut short, activities abandoned, and quality of life diminished.

Today’s treatments are falling short. Common surgeries like microfracture often fail within three to five years. The few available options are limited, expensive to perform, and often out of reach due to insurance restrictions. As a result, many patients are offered no treatment at all.

Articular Cartilage Paste Grafting (ArtCart) offers a regenerative surgical solution to this gap in care.

The Articular Cartilage Paste Graft (ArtCart) was developed in 1991 by Dr. Kevin R. Stone as a cost-effective, minimally invasive technique for cartilage repair indicated for both large and small cartilage lesions.

The technique uses a patient's own healthy cartilage and bone harvested from a neighboring site that is processed into a paste and impacted into the prepared cartilage defect area. Unlike other techniques, paste grafting is entirely arthroscopic, uses autologous tissue, and is performed in a single session.

Our research focuses on both clinical outcomes of ArtCart patients and the development of the new generation of ArtCart (ArtCart+), the augmented version of the paste graft designed to facilitate improved cartilage regeneration and global adoption for patients suffering from articular cartilage injury or osteoarthritis (OA).

Our long-term outcome data demonstrates that paste grafting provides sustained pain relief and functional improvement for patients with severe cartilage damage—a population often told their only option is joint replacement.

The 2016 study showing a median benefit time of 19.1 years following ArtCart represents one of the longest follow-ups in cartilage repair literature. Delaying partial or total knee replacement and brings a return to simple activity.

With ArtCart+, the addition of an adhesive agent and mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), there is augmented cartialge regeneration and improved graft attachment to surrounding tissue. ArtCart+ represent a single-step, globally accessible method of cartilage repair that will bring benefit to both veterinary patients and humans, enabling a robust return to movement.