Those with such damage generally suffer from pain, locking, clicking and swelling in the knee. This damaging condition often progresses with increasing pain if left untreated. Surgeons have used arthroscopic surgery to help such patients for some time. Now surgeons can remove a bit of the patient's own existing localized cartilage and use it to grow millions of new cloned cartilage cells in the laboratory. Then they insert these cells back into the knee.
Surgeons also use another procedure, called an osteochondral autograft, for small cartilage lesions.
In the future, doctors may be able to introduce substances into the body that get the cartilage to grow back on its own. But it's many years away.