The knee joint is an organ, and when organs fail, difficulties begin. Joint failure does not kill you, but it controls your life. Joint pain and loss of function significantly lower your quality of life and prevent you from doing the things you love. Healthy cartilage is a vital part of a healthy joint. Over time, cartilage defects progress to joint degeneration and osteoarthritis (OA), which today is the leading cause of disability among adults.
Joint preservation is the future of orthopedics. Over 650 million people suffer from knee joint degradation globally. The key drivers for this growth are an aging population, escalating obesity, and the desire for more active years in life. In addition, sports and related trauma drive cartilage destruction, increasing the need for early interventions that enable a quick return to sports and long-term maintenance of the results.
Early interventions to preserve joint structures and stop degradation are of paramount need. Askel’s COPLA® solution has been designed to address the key unmet needs of surgical cartilage repair:
- Science-based solution: The product is based on patented technology created by multidisciplinary academic research.
- Universal product: An affordable and available product that can be used for various lesion sizes by any orthopedic surgeon.
- Surgical simplicity: Implanted in a single surgery with an easy-to-adapt technique using existing instruments.
- Affordability: An off-the-shelf product with favorable production economics guarantees affordable pricing.
- Patient benefits: The exclusive promise of immediate full weight-bearing of the operated leg after surgery allows patients to begin early rehabilitation with fast pain relief and functional recovery.
- Joint preservation: Early intervention can preserve the damaged joint surface and postpone or even eliminate the need for total knee replacement surgery. The health economic benefits are evidently extensive.
The market for surgical knee cartilage repair is large and growing. For example, in the US alone, approximately one million cartilage repair surgeries are performed annually. Of these, 600,000 are estimated to be treatable with COPLA®. Askel can serve this market with its proprietary and industrially scalable in-house production capability.
We aim to become the gold standard of early surgical cartilage repair, and the RePace project has been a crucial component in reaching this goal.
