Somewhere in the world, a woman over 50 will have fractured a bone by the time you finish reading this sentence due to osteoporosis, a silent bone disease that can weaken the structural integrity of the skeletal system and a person’s quality of life. The disease weakens bones and makes them more likely to break because of reduced bone mineral density and bone mass, and it affects an estimated 75 million people across Europe, the USA, and Japan.

Menopause-associated estrogen loss makes the burden of this disease higher in women globally, as 1 in 3 women over age 50 is at risk of suffering an osteoporosis-related fracture.

A recent study published in Cell explored a novel stem cell therapy for advanced osteoporosis that cleverly uses a patient’s own stem cells as a biological targeting tag, binding to blood vessels in the bone marrow and guiding the infused stem cells directly to damaged bone tissue.