Edison would be proud

Rice professor’s cartilage breakthrough brings major award

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Not long ago, Kyriacos Athanasiou had one of those fly-on-the-wall moments we’d all love to experience.

”I was at an arthroscopy conference in Athens last summer and went to a session that had some innocuous title,” he remembered. ”I didn’t realize it was going to be all about my product.”

That would be his implantable scaffold to facilitate the self-repair of cartilage, a pioneering product he patented in the 1990s. Attendees were wowed, said Athanasiou, who remained incognito until another American doctor in the audience outed him.

“He didn’t really know me, but after a while this doctor from New York stood up and said, ‘Excuse me, I believe the inventor of this thing is here in the audience. …,'” he laughed.

There’ll be no hiding for Athanasiou, Rice’s Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Bioengineering and director of the Musculoskeletal Bioengineering Laboratory, when the American Society of Mechanical Engineers gives him the prestigious Thomas A. Edison Patent Award at its annual convention in Boston.

Now used the world over, Athanasiou’s creation is a porous, biodegradable scaffold that supports the growth of new cartilage in small defects in knees and other joints that have been damaged by injury or disease, problems once thought curable only by replacing damaged joints entirely.

”For the past five or six years, everybody has been talking about putting cells on scaffolds,” he said. ”But when we did it, it was completely virgin territory. It was dogma in orthopedic science and engineering that cartilage could not heal, period.”

Savio Woo, founder and director of the Musculoskeletal Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and David Hellums, emeritus professor of bioengineering at Rice, co-nominated Athanasiou for the honor, which will be presented at a black-tie dinner Nov. 3 at the society’s International Mechanical Congress and Exposition.