Following the start of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022;

Tina Deng, MSc, Principal Medical Devices Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers her view on why regenerative approaches are favored to treat sport injuries:

“As one of the most popular sports in the world, the incidence of soccer-related injuries is high, and the prevalence of cartilage lesions among soccer players is higher than in the general population based on GlobalData’s analysis. Cartilage repair procedures aim to regenerate or replace articular cartilage to reduce joint pain and to prevent the development of arthritis. The approach in the athletic population allows for a higher rate of return to sports and better recovery to the pre-injury level.

“According to GlobalData’s analysis, the cartilage repair market is expected to reach $2 billion by 2030, led by the intact tissue implants segment. The market is primarily driven by the improvement of regenerative therapy. Historically, regenerative approaches focus on tissue transplantation, often from a cadaver or from the patients themselves, but more recently there has been a push to provide specialized stem cell-based therapies to specifically regenerate damaged or diseased patient tissue. Advantages include balancing metabolic activity of cartilage and the chondrogenic differentiation, which shows great potential in treating soccer-related injuries.

“Additionally, third-generation or matrix-associated autologous chondrocyte implantation (ACI) was developed over the past ten years. ACI is a process whereby a patient’s own cartilage cells are collected, multiplied in a laboratory and then re-implanted into the damaged cartilage of the patient.

“Vericel’s MACI is the first FDA-approved product to offer autologous chondrocytes cultured on a porcine collagen membrane. It can be implanted with a generally simpler process than prior generations of ACI that required suturing a collagen patch. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, studied 2,010 patients who underwent ACI between 2012 and 2020 and found an increased rate of ACI from 2017–19 compared to 2014–16, whereas the re-operation rate was lower. The positive outcome shows that MACI has been gaining popularity and GlobalData expects the approach will be used more in treating cartilage-related sport injuries.”