Ailments that affect the musculoskeletal system loom large in human health, with damaged tendons and ligaments ranking second only to back pain in specialist referrals. In the US, for instance, there are approximately 250,000 shoulder tendon surgeries performed and almost two million referrals to clinicians.

In Australia alone there are about 14,000 surgeries for damaged shoulder tendons and about 6000 operations for tendons of the ankle each year.

What’s more, patients must commit to a prolonged convalescence, there are no drug therapies available to specifically treat damaged tendons and ligaments, and many surgical repairs fail within a year.

Such injuries are not only painful, but they also come with a high economic cost, since they severely curtail the sufferer’s day-to-day activities and ability to work.

“It’s a pretty large market that ranges across sportspeople and weekend warriors, as well as the general wear and tear and degeneration that takes place over the years,” says Paul Anderson, managing director of Perth-based biotherapeutic company Orthocell.

Orthocell is pioneering a groundbreaking approach to combating these complaints. The company’s solution, called autologous tenocyte therapy (ATT), harvests some of the patient’s healthy tissue and then regenerates the damaged tendons and ligaments.

“What we’re looking to do is to regenerate the damaged tendon and return it to a functional, pre-injury state, where the patient is able to return to their normal activities of daily living,” Anderson says. “We’re hoping to use the building blocks – the cells themselves – to regenerate the tissue, as opposed to just dealing with the symptoms.”

The process itself is very straightforward: the patient undergoes a small biopsy, which is done under local anaesthetic. The harvested cells are then taken to Orthocell’s laboratory where they are put into the tissue culturing process, which takes approximately four to five weeks.

The cells are cultivated to what Anderson describes as a clinically significant level and then they are returned back to the damaged tendon in the hope that those cells – the building blocks of the tendon – will regenerate effective tissue and return the tendon to structural integrity.