Lattrell Wells was a perfect candidate for the MACI procedure. Dr. Michael O'Malley is a sports medicine surgeon at Carilion Clinic, "It’s a two stage procedure. So what we do is we actually harvest a small portion of the patient's cartilage and bone cells and we send it to a lab where the lab then that grows additional cartilage cells. It comes back to us in a little sheet and six weeks after that initial surgery, we re-implant the cartilage in a second surgery where we implant that sheet depending on the size of lesion right where his defect. This the only option where there’s virtually no risk of any kind of graft rejection or anything of that nature.
