This is HUGE!
Basically a rock.
An Israeli company figured out how to take that rock from the sea and grow new cartilage in your knee.
Cartilage is the one thing in your body that never heals. You break a bone, it knits back together. Cut yourself, the skin closes over. But cartilage? Tear it and that's it, it's torn for good. No blood gets to it, and blood is how you fix anything, so your body just can't. It's also the slipperiest surface in all of nature. Slicker than ice. You've walked around on it your whole life without a thought, right up until the day it goes, and one bad landing at 24 turns into arthritis at 44.
For a hundred years, every fix was a bad trade. You could drill holes and pray some scar tissue grew in, the cheap patch that crumbles and gives out inside a couple years. You could rob healthy cartilage from another spot in the knee to fill the hole. Or you could wait for the whole joint to grind itself out and bolt in a fake knee, which nobody wants to give a 40-year-old.
Then CartiHeal bet on coral. And no, the coral doesn't turn into cartilage. It's stranger than that. Coral's skeleton is built almost exactly like the inside of human bone, so your body doesn't fight it. It moves in, goes to work, and about 18 months later the coral's dissolved off and left real cartilage behind. Yours.
And they proved it the hard way. Not the easy FDA route where you claim you're similar to something that already exists. They put it in a head-to-head trial against the standard surgeons had used for decades, and beat it. Four years out, the patients who got the coral were 87% less likely to need a knee replacement or a realignment surgery. It's the only implant the FDA has approved to do this.
If I'm ever that guy, the one being told at 45 that he needs a new knee, that he should quit running, that the metal one will just wear out and need doing all over again down the road, I know what I'd want in there instead. The coral.
Ben Allen
