what is the new process for growing bone?

Answer 1

I don't know if this is new or not, but I went through a procedure to regenerate bone in my lower jaw last week. I have genetic bone loss, and fortunately, it was caught on an x-ray before it became physically noticeable. The dentist cut away my gums all the way to the bone on the left bottom side and made a sort of pocket. Then she placed these little shavings of cadaver bone in there and sewed it back up. I have a mouth full of stitches still, and there is sort of a lump where the pocket full of bone is, but it really isn't as bad as it sounds. I get new x-rays in six months to see if it works.

Answer 2

Raymond:

it depends on whether you want to stimulate bone gain in the whole skeleton (i.e if someone has osteoporosis) or if you have had bone removed (i.e due to cancer).

If the former (osteoporosis) there is a new osteoporosis drug called Forteo (teriparitide) which is a fragment of the hormone PTH. You give yourself an injection daily. This will build back bone over about 18-24 months. However it is very costly.

If you want to stimulate repair of a bone defect there are 4 types of materials that can be used to stimulate bone growth once you've had bone removed/lost.

1) autograft - this is your own bone that is taken from your hip bone (iliac crest) or similar site and is crushed into small particles that are then put in the space where the space is that you want new bone in. This will produce new bone reproducibility, but requires more time for surgery and more time for recovery and can be painful

2) allograft -this is where they take bone from someone who has died and they crush it up and put it in the hole (defect). Sometimes they will remove the calcium from the bone so you only have the proteinaceous material. This is called demineralized bone matrix (DBM) and some of the proteins (called growth factors) will stimulate your own cells to make new bone.
This has the advantage of no second surgery but tends to be more variable in terms of success rate.

3) artificial materials - these lack any inherant biological activity, but act as a scaffold to allow your own cells to grow in make new bone in the space.

4) The newest option is to put in synthetic growth factors into the wound site. They can also be used to stimate healing in bones that have not healed properly (non-unions).
The choices here are the bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) which are approved for use in the USA and most recently PDGF. I don't know much about PDGF, but have done much research on BMPs. They are generally very effective but also very expensive and are only approved for certain applications.

One other thing to mention is the idea of using adult stem cells from bone marrow to grow bone outside the body that can then be transplanted later. However this is a long way from being used in humans