SPROUTING NEW BONE

Revolutionary approach heals backs, fractures. The putty prompts the body to grow new bone exactly where the doctor wants it.

NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT, by Robert Bazell - Jan. 2 — A revolutionary new way of healing backs and bones could someday benefit millions. The experimental approach, which utilizes a genetically engineered protein to help the body grow new bone exactly where it is needed, has proven 100 percent effective in early tests in patients with slipped vertebrae and fractures, researchers say.

A VERY common back problem has been making 68-year-old Vincent Porretti’s job painfully impossible. He’s the theater manager at an Atlantic City casino. “Oh, I love it. It’s the best job in the world,” he says. Porretti, who once dressed the hair of hundreds of celebrities on The Mike Douglas Show, has a disorder afflicting 6 percent of people over 65 to some degree. One of his vertebrae, or backbones, has slipped against another, causing severe pain. “It came to a point when I went to the doctor. . .he scared the Dickens out of me,” Porretti recalls. “He said the prognosis would be that I wouldn’t be able to walk in two years.” Porretti needed surgery to fuse four vertebrae together. Usually, doctors take a bone graft from the patient’s hip or put in metal rods to create the fusion. But both methods have serious side effects in 20 percent of cases. Porretti’s surgeon, Dr. Alexander Vaccaro of the Rothman Institute at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, is the first to try a revolutionary approach. He puts in a putty that actually prompts the body to grow new bone exactly where the doctor wants it.

“We’re not borrowing bone from any other part of the body, which is beautiful,” Vaccaro says. To use the putty — still experimental but expected to win approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration within the next year — the doctor simply adds water to a mix of two powders, and molds it like clay. The key ingredient: a protein called OP1 — a genetically engineered version of a natural body chemical that plays a major role in bone growth. Doctors are testing the putty not just on backs but also on fractures of legs, arms and other bones. Many say this is just the first step in a new technology that will transform orthopedic medicine. “I think we will find that bones will heal much better,” says Dr. Thomas Einhorn, chief of orthopedic surgery at Boston University Medical Center. “And we will even be in a position where we may be able to regenerate entire segments of the skeleton, and restore patients who have really severe injuries.”

So far, 19 patients have had the spinal surgery with OP1 putty with, Vaccaro says, a 100 percent success rate. Porretti says he was pain-free immediately after surgery, despite having to wear a brace for a few weeks. “I had the utmost confidence in the doctor, so I said, ‘Let’s go for it’ and the end result was, ‘It’s been a home run’,” he says. Robert Bazell is chief science correspondent for NBC News.

[Source: http://www.msnbc.com/news/510601.asp?0nm=H16N ]

 

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