From the patient's nose to his knee, literally, growing in the lab before ending up in the operating room. This, in short, was the path taken by some cartilage cells used to repair damaged joints, writes salute.eu.

A strategy that could help produce cartilage parts to replace damaged ones and, perhaps, delay prosthetic interventions, reports KosovaPress.

"The proposed solution is still experimental, but cartilage transplants have been studied for some time and these results describe the direction to move," emphasize Ivan Martin from the University of Basel (in Switzerland) and other authors of a new study published in the pages of Science Translational Medicine.