“It's A Bargain” Thrift Shop - Orthopaedic Hospital

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appliances are likely to cause a problem — and
when it does cause a problem, determine which
appliance to use in revision surgery so that the
person can have a better life.
In this case we have no developmental
biologist, but we do have an immunologist to
help us understand how the human immune
response is responding to our taking or not taking
care of the problem.
Previously, if this issue were left up to the
orthopaedic surgeon, the outcome might not be
ideal. He doesn’t know immunology and doesn’t
know about vitamin D. Our premise is that you
have to be able to accumulate expertise from
various different areas and that follows the biology
or the pathology.
motion: Are there other areas you’re exploring?
Dr. Adams: I can give you plenty more, but problems
related to osteoporosis and osteoarthritis
with hip replacement are the major endeavors.
It’s estimated that by 2015, all baby boomers
will be in the high-risk age group. Upwards of
30% to 40% of our population will have low
bone mass or osteoporosis.
You can look at two neighbors and say that
among the three of us, one of us for sure is going
to have a hip fracture, if we live long enough.
And we’re likely to live long enough because we
have better medicines to prevent heart disease
and help people to live longer with cancer.
So, that’s the approach. It’s a novel approach
for orthopaedic surgery because it’s not just
repairing a problem after it’s already been manifest.
We can do things to prevent the problem
from occurring even during adult life. Then
there are issues that we can bring into play that
we didn’t know before that would enable us to
help the orthopaedic surgeon more effectively
deal with this problem.
Also, there are issues at the beginning of life
that we can address — if we can figure out the
genetic background for some of these diseases.
The two that I’ve talked about — osteoporosis
and osteoarthritis — are genetic diseases. If you
ask your parents whether they have lost height
or broken a wrist or hip, you could pretty much
put yourself in that ballpark as being likely to
research
repeat exactly the phenotype of your parents.
Remember, almost 85% of your peak bone mass
is genetically determined.
motion: This interdisciplinary approach you’ve
described might be difficult to achieve in most
places. But the Orthopædic Hospital Research
Center seems well positioned within the UCLA
Court of Sciences to take advantage of crosspollination.
Dr. Adams: It’s true. In this building, our near
neighbors are the stem cell researchers and the
new department of molecular-cellular developmental
biology. This building directly across
from us is the nanotechnology institute. A lot
of the scaffolds, the things that we would make
on a nano scale to keep bone cells happy, could
be developed over there.
We anticipate that upstairs in the Orthopædic
Hospital Research Center, we will have a raft of
stem cell biologists interacting with the Stem
Cell Institute and the developmental biologists
to figure out how to make bone that stays alive
and regenerates itself.
We also expect to have bioengineers upstairs
who will be able to create the scaffolds that will
be needed to either repair a fracture that isn’t
healing normally or fill a bone defect or make
a hip prosthesis stick better so it won’t move
around and have to be replaced. All of these