Innovations in Bone Healing & How Science is Shaping the Future of Regeneration
episode
Becker’s Healthcare -- Spine and Orthopedic Podcast
14 min
2 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 5 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, everyone. This is Lucas Voss with Becker's Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series. Today, we're talking about innovations in bone healing and how science is shaping the future of regeneration. I'm so excited to welcome Dr. James Reiby. He's the Principal Scientific Advisor at at OrthoFix and brings more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical and medical device development.
What innovations in bone healing are discussed in this episode?
He's a member of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and is widely recognized for his expertise in bone healing and bone growth therapies. Dr. Rybie, welcome to the podcast. It's so great to have you.
Well, thank you for the invitation, Lucas. I'm excited to be here today.
It's great to have you. We have so much to talk about. So much has happened in your field over the last couple of decades, I'd argue. Again, you've been at the forefront of all of this, including a lot of the innovations that we've seen. Looking back to the early days of bone growth stimulation, what first sparked interest in exploring the electrical and mechanical signals as therapeutic tools here?
Well, I think the most interesting thing really went back to the early discoveries about when you bent bone, you actually generated a electrical signal. So obviously this started in Japan with... piezoelectric signals, but then followed up here in the U.S. by the group at University of Pennsylvania in Philly showing that these electric potentials were really streaming potentials. And of course, this opened this whole area up of do cells really respond to these electrical signals? And then years later, the same thing happened with mechanical signals, and that led to really development of ultrasound. So I think to really summarize, it was the ability to talk to cells and tissues without having to provide a drug or a protein to basically activate the healing process.
And so that was really, really exciting. And I can remember some of the first presentations we made, for example, at the academy meeting, the AAOS meeting on this, and really the audiences that we were able to draw to see this new data and really get excited about it.
Yeah, when you're describing it, it sounds really futuristic. It's really a step forward for, and again, less invasive. It gives people a chance to have better therapy. And I want to touch on the technology piece of this a little bit more in detail, specifically pulsed electromagnetic field technology, or PEMF, as we might refer to it. It's become an important approach in bone healing itself. From your perspective, what were some of those key scientific or clinical milestones that help validate PMF as a credible evidence-based therapy?
Well, I think... Scientifically, it was really when several labs showed that you could, with pulsed electromagnetic fields, you could actually stimulate cells and tissue culture to make growth factors like insulin-like growth factor, TGF beta, bone morphogenetic protein. And some of this work was done by Roy Aaron, for example, at Brown University and Barbara Boyan at the time at Georgia Tech. So these were really key scientific things. But I think the most important clinical evidence was really in spine fusion, and that was the use of pulsed electromagnetic fields for both lumbar fusion and cervical fusion based on multicenter placebo. So these were double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials that really showed very strongly
the positive benefit of PEMF stimulation for spine fusion. And that's something that actually the first placebo, the first double-blind placebo-controlled prospective multicenter study ever in the spine fusion was on pulsed electromagnetic fields. The other thing I want to bring up and not to host any particular company, but what the FDA particularly liked was that there was independent blinded radiographic review. And this was done by a group of surgeons and radiologists that had no knowledge of who was randomized to the active PEMF device or the control PEMF device. And I think that those studies really set the stage for the growth of PEMF technology
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Chapters
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