Roger Hartl, MD

I think we've got a lot of data now.

showing that augmentation of disease discs with various types of stem cells, autologous or allograft stem cells, holds a significant promise.

What I'm very excited about is our current work on angular repair because, you know, one of the biggest untapped needs in spine surgery is that whole problem of recurrent disc herniation in patients who have

a discectomy in the cervical or lumbar spine.

And then there's not much that we can do really to prevent the disc from further degenerating or even reherniating.

So the whole area of recurrent disc herniation and the opportunity that I think biologics can potentially give us here to prevent that from really happening over time.

I've done a lot of research in my lab.

I work with a biomedical engineer up in Ithaca, Larry Bonassa.

We've been working together for many years on disc repair, regeneration, replacement.

But what we've done now more recently is really try to bring to the forefront the whole area of annual repair.

We use collagen glues, plus-minus cells.

We just started a small company, a startup company,

that will hopefully be able to bring this through the FDA into clinical trials.

And that for me is really one of the most exciting things because it seems such a simple problem.

How do you prevent recurrent disc herniation?

But it's really a totally untapped problem.

We don't really have a good solution.

And there's so many patients and hundreds of thousands of patients every year who have lumbar disc herniation

who undergo surgery and they all ask the same question, you know, how can you prevent that disc from reherniating?

And we just don't have an answer.