At Bozeman Sports Medicine, we offer many advanced biologics treatments to help you recover in record time in the least invasive way.
Mesenchymal Signaling Cells (MSCs) are a powerful tool for treating a wide variety of conditions. We utilize them primarily for osteoarthritis, especially knee osteoarthritis, with improvement in pain and function that leaves the door open for further treatment years down the road if needed. Tendon tears (strains), such as hamstrings and rotator cuff, also respond well to MSCs, and we see improvement in the ultrasound appearance of the tendons in just 1-2 months. MSCs are obtained from your own bone marrow and act by secreting proteins and other compounds that influence the behavior of the cells within a joint or within an injury. In osteoarthritis, for example, the synovial cells that line the joint, the cartilage cells, and macrophages present in the joint are all synthesizing damaging compounds that destroy cartilage and bone. The compounds secreted by MSCs suppress these processes and return the environment of the joint to normal.
It is essential that MSCs be alive when they are injected so that they can perform these functions, and so that they can divide, and their daughter and granddaughter MSCs can carry on the same work. For this reason, we do not use umbilical stem cells, which have been proven to be dead and sometimes are not even stem cells. Rather, we use your own bone-marrow-derived MSCs, treating them gently so that they are ready to work when injected into your arthritic joint or other injury.
Dr. Arnold Caplan, the scientist who discovered mesenchymal stem cells, has recently told the cell therapy community (Dr. Adams was at that conference when this occurred) that they are more properly called signaling cells (Dr. Caplan actually recommended the term “Medicinal Signaling Cells”), because they produce compounds that signal other cells to heal and limit inflammation.
