Stanford published a paper in Science showing they regrew joint cartilage in aging mice — and in human tissue samples taken from knee-replacement patients — by blocking a single enzyme called 15-PGDH. It’s being hyped as the end of knee and hip replacement surgery. The science is real. The hype is getting ahead of what the paper actually says.

This episode walks through the study itself — the three experiments, the surprising mechanism (which doesn’t involve stem cells at all), and the actual clinical timeline.

Bottom line: the mechanism is a genuinely new paradigm for tissue regeneration. The human osteoarthritis trial? \.