Swiss doctors say they've taken cartilage cells from the noses of patients, and used them to successfully repair their damaged knees.

Professor Ivan Martin from the University of Basel in Switzerland and his colleagues describe their repair work on knee lesions in the online issue of the medical journal The Lancet.  This technique was initially used on ten patients aged 18 to 55 years old.  One of the test subjects had to drop out because of an unrelated sports injury, but the other nine had successful outcomes.

Martin and the team collected the cartilage samples from the noses of each patient.  They grew the harvested cells in the lab for two weeks, processed and cut the cartilage grafts into the proper shapes, and then transplanted the material into the donor patients' damaged knees.

Two years later, MRI scans revealed the transplanted tissue developed as the original cartilage would have; each of the nine reported improvements in use of their knees and experienced less pain than in the days before surgery; and no side-effects were reported.

"Overall, this first-in-human trial represents an important advance towards less invasive, cell-based repair technologies for articular cartilage defects," wrote Dr. Nicole Rotter and Dr. Rolf Brenner from Ulm University Medical in Germany in a Lancet commentary that ran alongside the main report, indicating cautious optimism about orthopedic specialists.

Further study into efficacy and cost effectiveness will precede possible approval of the new technique by European and US medical authorities.