Shoulders
What If Your Shoulder Has More Options Than You Thought?
A painful shoulder can change surprisingly much of your life.
Reaching overhead. Sleeping. Dressing. Working. Exercising. Even simple movements can become difficult when arthritis, cartilage damage, rotator cuff problems, or tendon degeneration take away your strength and mobility.
If you've been told that injections, physical therapy, or eventually surgery are your main options, there is another area of research you may want to know about.
The Research Goes Beyond the Shoulder
Regenerative medicine is being studied extensively throughout orthopedics—and the research surrounding osteoarthritis is particularly substantial.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis examined 25 randomized controlled trials involving 1,048 patients with knee osteoarthritis or cartilage lesions. The researchers found that advanced MSC therapy resulted in greater pain reduction than viscosupplementation at 12 months, although they appropriately noted that the overall certainty of evidence remains limited.
A separate 2025 meta-analysis of 8 randomized trials involving 502 patients found significant improvements in pain and function at 6 and 12 months following MSC treatment for knee osteoarthritis.
Why does this matter if your problem is your shoulder?
Because researchers are investigating many of the same biological mechanisms involved in joint degeneration and tissue repair—including inflammation, cartilage health, cellular signaling, and the environment surrounding injured tissues.
And there is shoulder-specific research, too.
A recent systematic review of MSC use with rotator cuff repair included 228 patients across five clinical studies. While MSC augmentation did not clearly improve clinical outcomes compared with surgery alone, the studies found a potentially important reduction in rotator-cuff re-tears at mid- and long-term follow-up. The authors emphasize that this evidence is still preliminary.So the shoulder research isn't as extensive as the research on knee osteoarthritis—but it is growing.
And when you put the shoulder-specific research alongside the much larger body of orthopedic research, there is enough here that we believe patients deserve the opportunity to investigate it for themselves.
Don't Take Our Word for It. Look at the Research.
We've selected research on osteoarthritis, cartilage, rotator cuff and other musculoskeletal applications—including studies that help explain why researchers are investigating regenerative approaches for orthopedic conditions.
Request our complimentary research collection and we'll email you the selected studies, brief summaries of what researchers found, and links to the original publications.
Read them yourself. See what is promising. See what remains uncertain. Bring the questions to your own doctor.
You don't have to decide that regenerative medicine is right for you. But you deserve to know what is being investigated before deciding you've run out of options.
→ Request the Complimentary Shoulder Research Collection