The Future of Tendon Repair

I'm Dr. Peter Lovato. I work for Northern Illinois Foot and Ankle Specialists. I'm also a podiatric surgeon out of Illinois. I am the educational director of the Northwest Illinois Foot and Ankle Fellowship. I'm also an attending with Rush University's residency program.
 
It's basically an MRI-based study. We started this a couple of years ago. We started it. I actually started using tendon repairs because initially, I didn't love the amniotic grafts. I didn't love the handling of it. There wasn't really a structural component to it. And once we started using it, to echo something that Dr. McEneaney said, once we started using Kerecis on wounds and got it in our hands, the application to tendons was very, very direct for me.
 
I hope that we can prove with future studies and even this study, decreased adhesions, decreased scar tissue, allowing the tendon to glide naturally after a surgical repair, as well as just the appearance of the tendon on MRI improving, which we've already seen with our study.
 
I'd also like to have my colleagues get this in their hands and realize the potential for this graft. We haven't been able to prove that it's a structural graft for a period of time, but future ideas of mine are to figure out a way to be able to tell how long this graft actually has tensile strength with regard to tendon rupture repairs.
 
But with the split thickness tears, it's mostly just reducing the adhesion component, reducing the scar tissue, allowing the wound to heal quicker to be able to take sutures out and be able to start bearing weight sooner, which allows type one collagen depositing at a better rate and a better tendon repair.
 
And then also, like Dr. Statkus has touched on, the decrease in pain scores. We've proved a decrease in pain in thermal scores in animal based models, but we haven't done it in human trials. So that's another thing that is on our radar that we'd like to do.
 
So there's a lot that is coming up with this respective to tendon repairs, rupture split thickness tears, and also just tendonitis and tendon advancements. So there's some pretty cool things on the horizon with respect to this modality of tendon repair.