Doc, will I be able to ski?
Of course.
Great, because I really never did get the hang of it.
Stammen, Jason A., Stephen Williams, David N. Ku, and Robert E. Guldberg. “Mechanical properties of a novel PVA hydrogel in shear and unconfined compression.” Biomaterials 22, no. 8 (2001): 799-806.
Our company actually worked on a product using polyvinyl alcohol gels. The group that published the paper above came up with the gel (polyvinyl alcohol, for use as cartilage replacement); we paid them money for their biocompatibility data.
My job was to extrude the gel into a long string of various diameters to be cut up and used as a plug. So I used a freezing anti-solvent as a coagulation bath. The result was a string so strong you could not break it (PVA hydrogen bonds like crazy).
This was sometime around 2004 or 2005. As you see the publication was from 2001.
It would be quite something if this new polyvinyl alcohol gel described here makes it to the market. All kinds of snags lie along the way: marketing, product durability under load, chronic toxicity, physician acceptance, etc.
By the way neither the Georgia Tech group nor our company ever marketed the gel. Now our company is in a completely different area of medicine.
Now, if this could have applications for ACL replacements...
This is then pressed and anchored into a hole where the damaged cartilage used to be.
= = =
So they still cut and pry and jab and drill and stuff.
Ouch.
My Ortho Dr. Linsey Rolston of New Castle Indiana has been doing Partial Knee Replacement for many years. He is the Inventer of this process. This not a new technique.
My wife used a product called gelone
Insurance refused to pay for prescription
We paid out of pocket around 400 dllrs
3 months now and pretty much knee pain not an issue
Wow. I was thinking about this possibility last night as an alternative to joint replacements. I hope this works out.
If it was available right now, it would be 15 years too late for my wife...
Not a word about how the body will respond to the chemicals in the gel.