An illustration of the injectable bone graft process. Photo: Bonus BioGroup.

JNS.org – An Israeli biotech company announced on Monday that it has, in a world first, successfully used lab-grown bone tissue to repair bone loss.

The startup, Bonus BioGroup, said it injected the semi-liquid bone graft, which was harvested from patients’ own fat cells, into the jaws of 11 patients and it successfully hardened and merged with existing bone to repair damage. Researchers are in the early stages of a clinical trial.

Bonus Biogroup CEO Shai Meretzki announced the ground-breaking reconstruction procedure’s success in a statement to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Meretzki told Israel’s i24 News that traditional methods of repairing bone damage are invasive, painful and expensive, and include risks of the patient rejecting the transplant.

“I was looking for a way to do it cheaper and easier for the patient and the medical system,” Meretzki said.

Ora Burger, the company’s vice president of regulation affairs, told Reuters that the transplant “was 100 percent successful” in this first stage, and the next step is to “conduct a clinical study in the extremities, long bones.”

So far, the Israeli biotech startup has raised some $14 million and the company plans to dual-list on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the coming months.