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Abstract
With cases reaching up to 32.5 million US patients, osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint disease that currently has no cure. Today, doctors can only prescribe pain medicine and suggest at-home remedies; however, the advancement of cell therapy serves as a promising pathway option. Here, in the collagenase-induced model of OA, a mouse model was used to characterize the symptoms and growth effects within the joint. Current studies have used mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to regenerate cartilage; however, these bone-marrow derived cells have limited engraftment. In this study, one knee joint was injected with collagenase and then treated with MSCs 21 days after OA was induced in order to examine the regenerative effects in vivo. MSCs derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) were given from a collaborating university and were harvested from healthy and diseased donors. MicroCT was used to visualize the regenerative capabilities of the MSCs, and a comparison between manufactured, healthy, and diseased cells was evaluated. Donor-specific MSCs can mitigate immune response and potentially improve the pro-regenerative activities of transplanted cells. Due to the nature of MSCs, we propose that the regeneration of cartilage in OA induced mice will be detectable after 6 weeks.