Vail Cartilage Symposium
The professionals and staff of the Steadman Hawkins Research Foundation hosted the Vail Cartilage Symposium at the Lodge at Vail. The two-day meeting, funded by educational grants from Pfizer, Inc., Genzyme Biosurgery, Innovation Sports, Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline, featured a world-renowned, international faculty of orthopaedic surgeons, each of whom has pioneered innovative procedures for treating articular cartilage injuries.

Co-chairs of the event were Dr. J. Richard Steadman, founder of the Steadman Hawkins Research Foundation and principal of the Vail-based Steadman Hawkins Clinic, and Dr. Martin Boublik, principal of the Steadman Hawkins Denver Clinic.  The two-day meeting for practicing orthopaedic surgeons included didactic sessions, presenter discussions, and a bioskills procedural laboratory.

The symposium faculty included:

• Dr. J. Richard Steadman, who presented a lecture and demonstration on microfracture, a surgical procedure he has developed that recruits stem cells from bone marrow to form new cartilage over areas in the joint where bare bone is exposed.
• Dr. Lars Peterson from Sweden, who demonstrated autologous chondrocyte transplantation, a two-stage procedure where cartilage cells are collected from a patient’s knee, grown outside of the body in a laboratory, and re-implanted into the knee joint surface defect.
• Dr. László Hangody of Hungary, who presented his experience with mosaicplasty.  In this procedure, pieces of cartilage and bone are removed from a non weight-bearing area of the knee and transplanted to a weight-bearing surface, to fill in where the cartilage has worn away.
• Dr. Allan Gross from Toronto, Ontario, who presented his experience with allografting of chondral defects.  In this procedure, large segments of bone and cartilage are removed from a donor cadaver knee, and implanted into a usually large defect.
• Dr. Riley Williams from New York City, who lectured on and demonstrated the allograft OATS procedure (osteochondral autograft transplantation system), in which a cylinder of bone and cartilage is transferred from a cadaver to fill a patient’s cartilage defect.
• Dr. Richard Hawkins from the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic of the Carolinas in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who discussed joint surface injuries in the shoulder.
• Dr. Marc Philippon from the Vail-based Steadman-Hawkins Clinic, who presented on sports hip injuries.

With growing worldwide interest and concern over the increase in degenerative arthritis, this seminar is timely and relevant to both the orthopaedic world and lay community. 

For further information on the Vail Cartilage Symposium, please visit www.vailcartilage.com.